ABRAHAM LINCOLN Alice Cary (Foully Assassinated, April, 1865. Inscribed to Punch) NO GLITTERING chaplet brought from other lands! His own loved prairies o'er his "gaunt gnarled hands" What need hath he now of a tardy crown, His name from mocking sneer and jest to save? He was a man whose like the world again Shall never see, to vex with blame or praise: The landmarks that attest his bright, brief reign Are battles, not the pomps of gala-days! The grandest leader of the grandest war To such a breast! or what a ribbon's grace! 'Tis to the man, and the man's honest worth, The mechanism of external forms The shifts that courtiers put their bodies through, Were alien ways to him-his brawny arms Had other work than posturing to do! Born of the people, well he knew to grasp The wants and wishes of the weak and small; Therefore we hold him with no shadow claspTherefore his name is household to us all. Therefore we love him with a love apart Forgive us then, O friends, if we are slow LINCOLN S. Weir Mitchell (Newport, October, 1891) CHAINED by stern duty to the rock of state, Till the keen lightnings bring the awful hour And, ever simpler, like a little child, Lived in unconscious nearness unto Him Who always on earth's little ones hath smiled. OUR GOOD PRESIDENT Phoebe Cary OUR sun hath gone down at the noon-day, And over the morning, the shadows Stop the proud boasting mouth of the cannon; Lo! the beautiful feet on the mountains, The white feet that came with glad tidings The Nation that firmly was settling Sits like Rizpah, in sackcloth and ashes, Who is dead? who, unmoved by our wailing, O my Land, stricken dumb in your anguish, That the hand which reached out of the darkness Yea, the arm and the head of the people, And that heart, o'er whose dread awful silence Was the truest, the gentlest, the sweetest, A man ever kept. Why, he heard from the dungeons, the rice-fields Every faint, feeble cry which oppression In her furnace, the centuries had welded And like withes, in the hands of his purpose, Who can be what he was to the people,— Our hearts with their anguish are broken, For us is the loss and the sorrow, For, ere this, face to face with his Father Giving into His hand a white record, THE VOICE OF DESTINY Lyman Whitney Allen THE hour was come, and in that hour he stood He heard the dusky toiling multitude Plaintively pleading that his hand should break He heard the voice of God from shining height, Had held her armies back In failure and defeat, till she should right The wrongs herself had sanctioned, and should win Justice unto her track; When, girded with the strength of righteousness, Above the battle's tide, She then would march to triumph, and possess THE MARTYR Herman Melville (Indicative of the Passion of the People on the 15th of GOOD Friday was the day. Of the prodigy and crime, When they killed him in his pity, When with yearning he was filled But they killed him in his kindness, There is sobbing of the strong, Beware the People weeping When they bare the iron hand. |