O honest face, which all men knew!
O tender heart, but known to few!
O wonder of the age,

Cut off by tragic rage!

Peace! Let the long procession come, For hark! the mournful, muffled drumThe trumpet's wail afar,

And see! the awful car!

Peace! Let the sad procession go,

While cannon boom, and bells toll slow:
And go, thou sacred car,
Bearing our woe afar!

Go, darkly borne, from State to State,
Whose loyal, sorrowing cities wait
To honor all they can

The dust of that good man!

Go, grandly borne, with such a train
As greatest kings might die to gain:
The just, the wise, the brave
Attend thee to the grave!

'And you, the soldiers of our wars,
Bronzed veterans, grim with noble scars,
Salute him once again,

Your late commander-slain!

Yes, let your tears, indignant, fall,
But leave your muskets on the wall:
Your country needs you now
Beside the forge, the plough!

(When justice shall unsheathe her brand,— If mercy may not stay her hand,

Nor would we have it so

She must direct the blow!)

And you, amid the master-race,
Who seem so strangely out of place,
Know ye who cometh? He
Who hath declared ye free!

Bow while the body passes- nay,
Fall on your knees, and weep, and pray!
Weep, weep-I would ye might —
Your poor, black faces white!

And children, you must come in bands,
With garlands in your little hands,
Of blue, and white, and red,
To strew before the dead!

So sweetly, sadly, sternly goes
The fallen to his last repose:

Beneath no mighty dome.
But in his modest home;

The churchyard where his children rest,
The quiet spot that suits him best:
There shall his grave be made,
And there his bones be laid!

And there his countrymen shall come,
With memory proud, with pity dumb,
And strangers far and near,
For many and many a year!

For many a year, and many an age,
While history on her ample page
The virtues shall enroll

Of that paternal soul!

SOME FOREIGN TRIBUTES TO LINCOLN

From "The Lives and Deeds of Our Self-
made Men" 1

BY MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

(1889)

On the first of May, 1865, Sir George Grey, in the English House of Commons, moved an address to the Crown, to express the feelings of the House upon the assassination of Mr. Lincoln. In this address he said that he was convinced that Mr. Lincoln "in the hour of victory, and in the triumph of victory, would have shown that wise forbearance, and that generous consideration, which would have added tenfold lustre to the fame that he had already acquired, amidst the varying fortunes of the war."

66

In seconding the second address, at the same time and place, Mr. Benjamin Disraeli said: 'But in the character of the victim, and in the very accessories of his almost latest moments, there is something so homely and so innocent that it takes the subject, as it were, out of the pomp of history, and 1 By permission of Dana Estes Company.

out of the ceremonial of diplomacy. It touches the heart of nations, and appeals to the domestic sentiments of mankind.”

In the House of Lords, Lord John Russell, in moving a similar address, observed: "President Lincoln was a man who, although he had not been distinguished before his election, had from that time displayed a character of so much integrity, sincerity and straightforwardness, and at the same time of so much kindness, that if any one could have been able to alleviate the pain and animosity which have prevailed during the civil war, I believe President Lincoln was the man to have done so." And again, in speaking of the question of amending the Constitution so as to prohibit slavery, he said: "We must all feel that there again the death of President Lincoln deprives the United States of the man who was the leader on this subject."

Mr. John Stuart Mill, the distinguished philosopher, in a letter to an American friend, used far stronger expressions than these guarded phrases of high officials. He termed Mr. Lincoln "the great citizen who had afforded so noble an example of the qualities befitting the first magistrate of a free people, and who, in the most trying circumstances, had gradually won not only the admiration, but almost the personal affection of all who love freedom or appreciate simplicity or uprightness."

.. Professor Goldwin Smith writing to the London Daily News, began by saying, "It is difficult to measure the calamity which the United States and

the world have sustained by the murder of President Lincoln. The assassin has done his best to strike down mercy and moderation, of both of which this good and noble life was the mainstay."

Senhor Rebello da Silva, a member of the Portuguese Chamber of Peers, in moving a resolution on the death of Mr. Lincoln, thus outlined his character: "He is truly great who rises to the loftiest heights from profound obscurity, relying solely on his own merits as did Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln. For these arose to power and greatness, not through any favor or grace, by a chance cradle, or genealogy, but through the prestige of their own deeds, through the nobility which begins and ends with themselves the sole offspring of their own works. Lincoln was of this privileged class; he belonged to this aristocracy. In infancy, his energetic soul was nourished by poverty. In youth, he learned through toil the love of liberty, and respect for the rights of man. Even to the age of twenty-two, educated in adversity, his hands made callous by honorable labor, he rested from the fatigues of the field, spelling out, in the pages of the Bible, in the lessons of the gospel, in the fugitive leaves of the daily journal — which the aurora opens, and the night disperses the first rudiments of instruction, which his solitary meditations ripened. The chrysalis felt one day the ray of the sun, which called it to life, broke its involucrum, and it launched forth fearlessly from the darkness of its humble cloister into the luminous spaces of its destiny. The farmer, day-laborer,