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ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Alice Cary

(Foully Assassinated, April, 1865. Inscribed to Punch)

NO GLITTERING chaplet brought from other lands!
As in his life, this man, in death, is ours;

His own loved prairies o'er his "gaunt gnarled hands"
Have fitly drawn their sheet of summer flowers.

What need hath he now of a tardy crown,

His name from mocking sneer and jest to save?
When every plowman turns his furrow down
As soft as though it fell upon his grave.

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
That ever time in history gave a place;
What were the tinsel flattery of a star

To such a breast! or what a ribbon's grace!

'Tis to the man, and the man's honest worth,
The nation's loyalty in tears upsprings;
Through him the soil of labor shines henceforth
High o'er the silken braideries of kings.

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
From any fawning love of pedigree-
His was the royal soul and mind and heart-
Not the poor outward shows of royalty.

Forgive us then, O friends, if we are slow
To meet your recognition of his worth-
We're jealous of the very tears that flow
From eyes that never loved a humble hearth.

LINCOLN

S. Weir Mitchell

(Newport, October, 1891)

CHAINED by stern duty to the rock of state,
His spirit armed in mail of rugged mirth,
Ever above, though ever near the earth,
Yet felt his heart the vulture beaks that sate
Base appetites, and foul with slander, wait

Till the keen lightnings bring the awful hour
When wounds and sufferings shall give them power.
Most was he like to Luther, gay and great,
Solemn and mirthful, strong of heart and limb.
Tender and simple too; he was so near
To all things human that he cast out fear,

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,
The heavens are black;

And over the morning, the shadows
Of night-time are back,

Stop the proud boasting mouth of the cannon;
Hush the mirth and the shout;-
God is God! and the ways of Jehovah
Are past finding out.

Lo! the beautiful feet on the mountains,
That yesterday stood,

The white feet that came with glad tidings
Are dabbled in blood.

The Nation that firmly was settling
The crown on her head,

Sits like Rizpah, in sackcloth and ashes,
And watches her dead.

Who is dead? who, unmoved by our wailing,
Is lying so low?

O my Land, stricken dumb in your anguish,
Do you feel, do you know,

That the hand which reached out of the darkness
Hath taken the whole;

Yea, the arm and the head of the people,
The heart and the soul?

And that heart, o'er whose dread awful silence
A nation has wept;

Was the truest, the gentlest, the sweetest,

A man ever kept.

Why, he heard from the dungeons, the rice-fields
The dark holds of ships,

Every faint, feeble cry which oppression
Smothered down on men's lips.

In her furnace, the centuries had welded
Their fetter and chain;

And like withes, in the hands of his purpose,
He snapped them in twain.

Who can be what he was to the people,—
What he was to the state?
Shall the ages bring to us another
As good and as great?

Our hearts with their anguish are broken,
Our wet eyes are dim;

For us is the loss and the sorrow,
The triumph for him!

For, ere this, face to face with his Father
Our martyr hath stood;

Giving into His hand a white record,
With its great seal of blood.

THE VOICE OF DESTINY

Lyman Whitney Allen

THE hour was come, and in that hour he stood
Responsive to the sacred voice that spoke
From Heaven and earth and sea.

He heard the dusky toiling multitude

Plaintively pleading that his hand should break
Their bonds and set them free.

He heard the voice of God from shining height,
Who, for the reason of the Nation's sin,

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,
God for her, with descending seraphim,

Above the battle's tide,

She then would march to triumph, and possess
A land united to the farthest rim,
Through sorrow purified.

THE MARTYR

Herman Melville

(Indicative of the Passion of the People on the 15th of
April, 1865)

GOOD Friday was the day.

Of the prodigy and crime,

When they killed him in his pity,
When they killed him in his prime
Of clemency and calm-

When with yearning he was filled
To redeem the evil-willed,
And, though conqueror, be kind;

But they killed him in his kindness,
In their madness, in their blindness,
And they killed him from behind.

There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand:

Beware the People weeping

When they bare the iron hand.

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