Full and rich with freedom rife,
All his powers engaging?
Hero! Hero! Sent from God!
Leader of his people.

V

Saw you when the war was done (Such is Lincoln's story)

Him whose strength the strife had won Sinking like the setting sun

Crowned with human glory? Hero! Hero! Sent from God! Leader of his people.

VI

Saw you in our country's roll
Midst her saints and sages:
Lincoln's name upon the scroll—
Standing at the topmost goal
On the nation's pages?
Hero! Hero! Sent from God!
Leader of his people.

VII

Hero! Yes! We know thy fame;

It will live for ever!

Thou to us art still the same;
Great the glory of thy name,
Great thy strong endeavor!
Hero! Hero! Sent from God!
Leader of his people.

FROM

THE "COMMEMORATION ODE"

James Russell Lowell

LIFE may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to truth be sealed

As bravely in the closet as the field,
So bountiful is Fate;

But then to stand beside her,

When craven churls deride her,

To front a lie in arms and not to yield,
This shows, methinks, God's plan

And measure of a stalwart man,

Limbed like the old heroic breeds,

Who stands self-poised on manhood's solid earth, Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,

Fed from within, with all the strength he needs.

Such was he, our martyr chief,

Whom late the nation he had led

With ashes on her head,

Wept with the passion of an angry grief;

Forgive me if from present things I turn
To speak what in my heart will beat and burn,
And hang my wreath on this world-honored urn.
Nature, they say, doth dote,

And can not make a man

Save on some worn-out plan,

Repeating us by rote;

For him her old world molds aside she threw,

And, choosing sweet clay from the breast

Of the unexhausted West,

With stuff untainted, shaped a hero new,

Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.

How beautiful to see

Once more a shepherd of mankind, indeed,
Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead;
One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,
Not lured by any cheat of birth,

But by his clean-grained human worth,
And brave old wisdom of sincerity!
They know that outward grace is dust;

They could not choose but trust

In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill,

And supple-tempered will

That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.

His was no lonely mountain peak of mind,
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,
A sea mark now, now lost in vapors blind;
Broad prairie rather, genial, level lined,
Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,

Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.
Nothing of Europe here,

Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,

Ere any names of serf or peer

Could Nature's equal scheme deface

And thwart her genial will;

Here was a type of the true elder race,

And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

I praise him not; it were too late;

And some innative weakness there must be

In him who condescends to victory

Such as the present gives and can not wait,

Safe in himself as in a fate.

So always firmly he:

He knew to bide his time,

And can his fame abide,

Still patient in his faith sublime,
Till the wise years decide.

Great captains with their guns and drums,
Disturb our judgment of the hour,
But at last Silence comes;

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,

The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.

LINCOLN

James Whitcomb Riley

A PEACEFUL life;-just toil and rest—

All his desire;—

To read the books he liked the best

Beside the cabin fire

God's word and man's;-to peer sometimes
Above the page, in smouldering gleams,
And catch, like far heroic rhymes,

The onmarch of his dreams.

A peaceful life;-to hear the low
Of pastured herds,

Or woodman's axe that, blow on blow,
Fell sweet as rhythmic words.

And yet there stirred within his breast
A fateful pulse that, like a roll

Of drums, made high above his rest
A tumult in his soul.

A peaceful life!

They haled him even

As One was haled

Whose open palms were nailed toward Heaven

When prayers nor aught availed.

And, lo, he paid the selfsame price
To lull a nation's awful strife
And will us, through the sacrifice
Of self, his peaceful life.

LINCOLN

Julia Ward Howe

THROUGH the dim pageant of the years
A wondrous tracery appears;

A cabin of the Western wild
Shelters to sleep a newborn child.

Nor nurse, nor parent dear can know
The way those infant feet must go;
And yet a nation's help and hope
Are sealed within that horoscope.

Beyond is toil for daily bread
And thought, to noble issues led,
And courage arming for the morn
For whose behest this man was born.

A man of homely, rustic ways,
Yet he achieves the forum's praise,

And soon earth's highest meed has won,
The seat and sway of Washington.

No throne of honors and delights;
Distrustful days and sleepless nights,
To struggle, suffer, and aspire,
Like Israel, led by cloud and fire.