Chapter 2

As leaving some grand waterfall, We, lingering, list its roar-- So memory will hallow all We've known but know no more.

Near twenty years have passed away Since here I bid farewell To woods and fields, and scenes of play, And playmates loved so well.

Where many were, but few remain Of old familiar things; But seeing them to mind again The lost and absent brings.

The friends I left that parting day, How changed, as time has sped! Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray; And half of all are dead.

I hear the loved survivors tell How nought from death could save, Till every sound appears a knell, And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with pensive tread, And pace the hollow rooms, And feel (companion of the dead) I'm living in the tombs.

In September he wrote the following letter:

Springfield, September 6, 1846.

FRIEND JOHNSTON: You remember when I wrote you from Tremont last spring, sending you a little canto of what I called poetry, I promised to bore you with another some time. I now fulfil the promise. The subject of the present one is an insane man; his name is Matthew Gentry. He is three years older than I, and when we were boys we went to school together. He was rather a bright lad, and the son of the rich man of a very poor neighborhood. At the age of nineteen he unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity. When, as I told you in my other letter, I visited my old home in the fall of 1844, I found him still lingering in this wretched condition. In my poetizing mood, I could not forget the impression his case made upon me. Here is the result:

But here's an object more of dread Than aught the grave contains-- A human form with reason fled, While wretched life remains.

When terror spread, and neighbors ran Your dangerous strength to bind, And soon, a howling, crazy man, Your limbs were fast confined;

How then you strove and shrieked aloud, Your bones and sinews bared; And fiendish on the gazing crowd With burning eyeballs glared;

And begged and swore, and wept and prayed, With maniac laughter joined; How fearful were these signs displayed By pangs that killed the mind!

And when at length the drear and long Time soothed thy fiercer woes, How plaintively thy mournful song Upon the still night rose!

I've heard it oft as if I dreamed, Far distant, sweet and lone, The funeral dirge it ever seemed Of reason dead and gone.

To drink its strains I've stole away, All stealthily and still, Ere yet the rising god of day Had streaked the eastern hill.

Air held her breath; trees with the spell Seemed sorrowing angels round, Whose swelling tears in dewdrops fell Upon the listening ground.

But this is past, and naught remains That raised thee o'er the brute: Thy piercing shrieks and soothing strains Are like, forever mute.

Now fare thee well! More thou the cause Than subject now of woe. All mental pangs by time's kind laws Hast lost the power to know.

O death! thou awe-inspiring prince That keepst the world in fear, Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence, And leave him lingering here?

If I should ever send another, the subject will be a "Bear Hunt."

Yours as ever, A. LINCOLN.

The poem alluded to in the first letter is undoubtedly "Oh, Why Should the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud?", by William Knox, a Scottish poet, known to fame only by its authorship. It remained the favorite of Lincoln until his death, being frequently alluded to by him in conversation with his friends. Because it so aptly presents Lincoln's own spirit it is here presented in full. During his Presidency he said:

"There is a poem which has been a great favorite with me for years, which was first shown me when a young man by a friend, and which I afterwards saw and cut from a newspaper and learned by heart. I would give a good deal to know who wrote it, but I have never been able to ascertain."

Then, half closing his eyes, he repeated the verses:

OH, WHY SHOULD THE SPIRIT OF MORTAL BE PROUD?

By WILLIAM KNOX.

William Knox was born at Firth, in the parish of Lilliesleaf, in the county of Roxburghshire, on the 17th of August, 1789. From his early youth he composed verses. He merited the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who afforded him pecuniary assistance. He died November 12, 1825, at the age of thirty-six.

Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-flitting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, The flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, He passes from life to his rest in the grave.

The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade, Be scattered around and together be laid; And the young and the old, and the low and the high Shall molder to dust and together shall lie.

The infant a mother attended and loved, The mother that infant's affection who proved, The husband that mother and infant who blest, Each, all, are away to their dwellings of rest.

The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose eye, Shone beauty and pleasure, her triumphs are by; And the mem'ry of those who loved her and praised Are alike from the minds of the living erased.

The hand of the king that the scepter hath borne, The brow of the priest that the miter hath worn, The eye of the sage and the heart of the brave Are hidden and lost in the depths of the grave.

The peasant whose lot was to sow and to reap, The herdsman who climbed with his goats up the steep, The beggar who wandered in search of his bread, Have faded away like the grass that we tread.

The saint who enjoyed the communion of heaven, The sinner who dared to remain unforgiven, The wise and the foolish, the guilty and just, Have quietly mingled their bones in the dust.

So the multitude goes like the flower or the weed That withers away to let others succeed, So the multitude comes, even those we behold, To repeat every tale that has often been told.

For we are the same that our fathers have been; We see the same sights our fathers have seen; We drink the same streams, and view the same sun, And run the same course our fathers have run.

The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think, From the death we are shrinking our fathers would shrink; To the life we are clinging they also would cling, But it speeds from us all like a bird on the wing.

They loved, but the story we cannot unfold; They scorned, but the heart of the haughty is cold; They grieved, but no wail from their slumber will come; They joyed, but the tongue of their gladness is dumb.

They died, ay, they died. We things that are now, That walk on the turf that lies over their brow, And make in their dwellings a transient abode, Meet the things that they met on their pilgrimage road.

Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain, Are mingled together in sunshine and rain: And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, Still follow each other like surge upon surge.

'Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath, From the blossom of health to the paleness of death, From the gilded salon to the bier and the shroud,-- Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

"The Last Leaf," by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was also a favorite poem of Lincoln, says Henry C. Whitney, his friend and biographer (in his "Life of Lincoln," Vol. I, page 238):

"Over and over again I have heard him repeat:

The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom; And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb.

and tears would come unbidden to his eyes, probably at thought of the grave (his mother's) at Gentryville, or that in the bend of the Sangamo" (of Ann Rutledge, his first love, who died shortly before the time set for their wedding, and whose memory Lincoln ever kept sacred).

While Lincoln, so far as can be ascertained, wrote nothing in verse after 1846, he developed in his speeches a literary style which is poetical in the highest sense of that term. More than all American statesmen his utterances and writings possess that classic quality whose supreme expression is found in Greek literature. This is because Lincoln had an essentially Hellenic mind. First of all the architecture of his thought was that of the Greek masters, who, whether as Phidias they built the Parthenon to crown with harmonious beauty the Acropolis, or as Homer they recorded in swelling narrative from its dramatic beginning the strife of the Achaeans before Troy, or even as Euclid, they developed from postulates the relations of space, had a deep insight into the order in which mother nature was striving to express herself, and a reverent impulse to aid her in bodying forth according to her methods the ideal forms of the cosmos, the world of beauty, no less within the soul of man than without it, which was intended by such help to be realized as a whole in the infinity of time, and in part in the vision of every true workman. In short, Lincoln had a profound sense of the fitness of things, that which Aristotle, the scientific analyst of human thought and the philosopher of its proper expression, called "poetic justice." He strove to make his reasoning processes strictly logical, and to this end carried with him as he rode the legal circuit not law-books, but a copy of Euclid's geometry, and passed his time on the way demonstrating to his drivers the theorems therein proposed. "Demonstrate" he said he considered to be the greatest word in the English language. He constructed every one of his later speeches on the plan of a Euclidean solution. His Cooper Union speech on "Slavery as the Fathers Viewed It," which contributed so largely to his Presidential nomination, was such a demonstration, settling what was thereafter never attempted to be controverted: his contention that the makers of the Constitution merely tolerated property in human flesh and blood as a primitive and passing phase of civilization, and never intended that it should be perpetuated by the charter of the Republic.

So, too, the Gettysburg speech, brief as it is, is the statement of a thesis, the principles upon which the Fathers founded the nation, and of the heroic demonstration of the same by the soldiers fallen on the field, and the addition of a moral corollary of this, the high resolve of the living to prosecute the work until the vision of the Fathers was realized.

In substance of thought and in form of its presentation the speech is as perfect a poem as ever was written, and even in the minor qualities of artistic language--rhythm and cadence, phonetic euphony, rhetorical symbolism, and that subtle reminiscence of a great literary and spiritual inheritance, the Bible, which stands to us as Homer did to the ancients--it excels the finest gem to be found in poetic cabinets from the Greek Anthology downward. Only because it was not written in the typography of verse, with capitalized and paragraphed initial words at the beginning of each thought-group of words, has it failed of recognition as a poem by academic minds. Had Walt Whitman composed the address, and printed it in the above manner, it would now appear in every anthology of poetry published since its date. To convince of this those conventional people who must have an ocular demonstration of form in order to compare the address with accepted examples of poetry, I will dare to incur the condemnation of those who rightly look upon such a departure from Lincoln's own manner of writing the speech as profanation, and present it in the shape of _vers libre_. For the latter class of readers this, the greatest poem by Lincoln, the greatest, indeed, yet produced in America, may be preferably read in the original form on page 100 of this collection. I trust that these, especially if they are teachers of literature, will pardon, for the sake of others less cultivated in poetic taste, what may appear a duplication here, unnecessary to themselves, of the address.

SPEECH AT GETTYSBURG

By ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Four score and seven years ago Our fathers brought forth on this continent A new nation, Conceived in liberty, And dedicated to the proposition That all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, Testing whether that nation, Or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, Can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field As a final resting-place For those who here gave their lives That that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper That we should do this. But, in a larger sense, We cannot dedicate-- We cannot consecrate-- We cannot hallow-- This ground. The brave men, living and dead, Who struggled here, Have consecrated it far above our poor power To add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember What we say here, But it can never forget What they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, To be dedicated here to the unfinished work Which they who fought here have so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated To the great task remaining before us-- That from these honored dead We take increased devotion to that cause For which they gave the last full measure of devotion; That we here highly resolve That these dead shall not have died in vain; That this nation, under God, Shall have a new birth of freedom; And that government of the people, By the people, and for the people Shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln attained this classic perfection of ordered thought, and with it, as an inevitable accompaniment this classic beauty of expression, only by great struggle. He became a poet of the first rank only by virtue of his moral spirit. He was continually correcting deficiencies in his character, which were far greater than is generally received, owing to the tendency of American historians of the tribe of Parson Weems to find by force illustrations of moral heroism in the youth of our great men. Thus Lincoln is represented as a noble lad, who, having allowed a borrowed book to be ruined by rain, went to the owner and offered to "pull fodder" to repay him, which the man ungenerously permitted him to do. The truth is, that the neighbor, to whom the book was a cherished possession, required him to do the work in repayment, and that Lincoln not only did it grudgingly, but afterwards lampooned the man so severely in satiric verse that he was ashamed to show himself at neighborhood gatherings. All the people about Gentryville feared Lincoln's caustic wit, and disliked him for it, although they were greatly impressed with his ability exhibited thereby. Lincoln recognized his moral obliquity, and curbed his propensity for satire, which was a case of that "exercise of natural faculty" which affects all gifted persons. And when he left that region he visited all the neighbors, and asked pardon of those whom he had ridiculed. The true Lincoln is a far better example to boys than the fictitious one, in that he had more unlovely traits at first than the average lad, yet he reformed, with the result that, when he went to new scenes, he speedily became the most popular young man in the neighborhood. He was one of those who

"rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things."

The reformation of his character by self examination and determination not to make the same mistake again seems to have induced similar effects and methods for their attainment in the case of his intellectual development. Whatever the connection, both regenerations proceeded apace. Lincoln at first was a shallow thinker, accepting without examination the views of others, especially popular statesmen, such as Henry Clay, whose magnetic personality was drawing to himself the high-spirited young men of the West. Some of the political doctrines which Lincoln then adopted he retained to the end, these being on subjects such as taxation and finance whose moral bearing was not apparent, and therefore into which he never inquired closely, for Lincoln's mind could not be profoundly interested in any save a moral question. When he found that a revered statesman was weak upon a crucial moral issue, he repressed his innate tendency to loyalty and rejected him. Thus, after a visit to Henry Clay in Kentucky, when the slavery question was arising to vex the country despite the efforts the aged statesman had made to settle it by the compromise of 1850, Lincoln returned disillusioned, having found that the light he himself possessed on the subject was clearer than that of his old leader. The eulogy which he delivered on the death of Clay, which occurred shortly afterward (in 1852), is the most perfunctory of all his addresses.

Indeed, not till the time of the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1854, which brought Lincoln back into politics by its overthrow of what he regarded as the constitutional exclusion of slavery from the Territories, did he rise to his highest powers as a thinker and speaker. Lincoln had been defeated for reelection to Congress because of his opposition, though not highly moral in character, to the popular Mexican war, and, regarding himself as a political failure, he had devoted himself to law. His most notable speech in the House of Representatives, a well composed satirical arraignment of President Polk for throwing the country into war, had failed utterly of its intended effect, probably because of its trimming partisan tone. In 1854 he was relieved of the trammels of party, the Whigs having gone to smash. Anti-slavery had become a great moral movement, and he was drawn into its current. Almost at once he became its Western leader. His speech against the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise which had been effected by his inveterate antagonist, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, was his first classic achievement in argumentative oratory. While in the greater aspect of artistic composition, the form of the address as a whole, his master was Euclid, in minor points the influence of Shakespeare, of whom Lincoln had become a great reader, was apparent, as indicated by a quotation from the dramatist, and an application to Senator Douglas of the scene of Lady Macbeth trying to wash out the indelible stain upon her hand. Also the Bible was the source of strong and telling phrases and figures of speech. Thus he denominated slavery as "the great Behemoth of danger," and asked, "shall the strong grip of the nation be loosened upon him, to intrust him to the hands of his feeble keepers?"

And, in the following passage, characteristic of the new Lincoln, I think that either Shakespeare and the Bible had combined to inspire him with graphic description of character and moral indignation, or they enforced these native powers.

"Again, you have among you a sneaking individual of the class of native tyrants known as the 'Slave-Dealer'. He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave at a speculative price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children. If you are obliged to deal with him you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet, but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony--instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact."

Of Lincoln's critical appreciation of Shakespeare Frank B. Carpenter, the artist of the "First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation" (see illustration on page 206), writes in his "Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln" as follows:

"Presently the conversation turned upon Shakspeare, of whom it is well known Mr. Lincoln was very fond. He once remarked, 'It matters not to me whether Shakspeare be well or ill acted; with him the thought suffices.' Edwin Booth was playing an engagement at this time at Grover's Theatre. He had been announced for the coming evening in his famous part of _Hamlet_. The President had never witnessed his representation of this character, and he proposed being present. The mention of this play, which I afterward learned had at all times a peculiar charm for Mr. Lincoln's mind, waked up a train of thought I was not prepared for. Said he,--and his words have often returned to me with a sad interest since his own assassination,--'There is one passage of the play of "Hamlet" which is very apt to be slurred over by the actor, or omitted altogether, which seems to me the choicest part of the play. It is the soliloquy of the King, after the murder. It always struck me as one of the finest touches of nature in the world.'

"Then, throwing himself into the very spirit of the scene, he took up the words:--