PARDON

Julia Ward Howe

(Wilkes Booth-April 26th, 1865)

PAINS the sharp sentence the heart in whose wrath it was uttered,

Now thou art cold;

Vengeance, the headlong, and Justice, with purpose close muttered,

Loosen their hold.

Death brings atonement; he did that whereof ye accuse him,

Murder accurst;

But from that crisis of crime in which Satan did lose

him,

Suffered the worst.

Harshly the red dawn arose on a deed of his doing,
Never to mend;

But harsher days he wore out in the bitter pursuing
And the wild end.

So lift the pale flag of truce, wrap those mysteries round him,

In whose avail

Madness that moved, and the swift retribution that found him,

Falter and fail.

So the soft purples that quiet the heavens with mourn

ing

Willing to fall,

Lend him one fold, his illustrious victim adorning

With wider pall.

Back to the cross, where the Savior uplifted in dying Bade all souls live,

Turns the reft bosom of Nature, his mother, low sighing,

Greatest, forgive!

LINCOLN

Richard Linthicum

(On the Fiftieth Anniversary of His Nomination for President of the United States, May 18th, 1860-1910)

The Beginning

WHAT strong, sure hand shall guide the laboring ship
Through seas that gather rage beneath black skies
And bring a new world's freighted hopes to port?
Give us a captain bold and tried and true,
Not this gaunt, shambling, homespun lout—
Railsplitter, backwoods jester, wrestling clown.

The End

A sturdy oak knit to the virgin soil,

Its sheltering boughs in benediction spread
And nerve-responsive to each gentle breeze,
Storm-racked and bent, the forest's pride and chief,
Outlives the tempest and the lightning's wrath
To die in its full prime, stung by a worm.

The Retrospect

As in a mountain range one giant peak
Lifts its tall head above its fellow-crests,
A guide to all within the lofty land,
A world-enriching treasure in its depths,
So Lincoln stood among his fellow-men,
With rugged, seamy front and heart of gold.

Lydia Landon Elliott

THE deeds of him who bore that name
On Ethiopia's soul are marked in flame!
Caressed at birth by Toil's hard hands,
He lingered not, till Life's uplands
Rose clear, distinct before his gaze-
A golden mist from purplish haze.
Honesty, faith, pure love, exemplified;
Great Nature wept when Lincoln died!

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Walter Malone

A BLEND of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears;
A quaint knight-errant of the pioneers;

A homely hero born of star and sod;
A Peasant Prince; a Masterpiece of God.

LINCOLN THE BOY

James Whitcomb Riley

O SIMPLE as the rhymes that tell
The simplest tales of youth,

Or simple as a miracle

Beside the simplest truth

So simple seems the view we share
With our Immortals, sheer

From Glory looking down to where
They were as children here.

Or thus we know, nor doubt it not,
The boy he must have been

Whose budding heart bloomed with the thought
All men are kith and kin—
With love-light in his eyes and shade

Of prescient tears:-Because

Only of such a boy were made

The loving man he was.

THE STROKE OF JUSTICE

Lyman Whitney Allen

THE hour was come, the Nation's crucial hour;
A crisis of the world, a turn of time;

The ages' hope and dream.

And one undaunted soul, sinewed with power,
Freedom's anointed, rose to height sublime,
Imperial and supreme;

And, lifting high o'er groaning multitude
His sovereign scepter, smote with such a stroke
The chains of centuries,

That earth was shaken to its farthest rood;
That million manacles asunder broke,
And myriad properties

Became, in one immortal moment,―men;
Free with the free in all the rounded earth;
Redeemed by martyr blood;

To stand with faces to the light again,
Attaining, through their resurrection birth,
To human brotherhood.

LINCOLN

Thomas MacKellar

SO DEEP our grief, it may be silence is
The meetest tribute to the father's name:

A secret shrine in every heart is his

Whom death hath girt with an immortal fame; And in this dim recess our thoughts abide,

Clad in the garment of unspoken grief, As fain the sorrow of the heart to hide

That yields no tears to give our woe relief.

But death is not to such as he, we cry:

His tongue is mute; his heart may pulse no more:

Yet men so good and loved do never die;

But while the tide shall flow upon the shore

Of time to come, a presence to the eye
Of nations shall he be, and evermore
Shall freemen treasure in historic page
This martyr-hero of earth's noblest age.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Rose Terry Cooke

("Strangulatus Pro Republica")

HUNDREDS there have been, loftier than their kind,
Heroes and victors in the world's great wars:
Hundreds, exalted as the eternal stars,

By the great heart, or keen and mighty mind;
There have been sufferers, maimed and halt and blind,
Who bore their woes in such triumphant calm

That God hath crowned them with the martyr's

palm;

And there were those who fought through fire to find