languor, through weeks of agony that was not less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes, whose lips may tell what brilliant, broken plans, what baffled, high ambitions, what sundering of strong, warm, manhood's friendships, what bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation; a great host of sustaining friends; a cherished and happy mother, wearing the full, rich honors of her early toil and tears; the wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the little boys, not yet emerged from childhood's day of frolic; the fair young daughter; the sturdy sons just springing into closest companionship, claiming every day and every day rewarding a father's love and care, and in his heart the eager, rejoicing power to meet all demands. Before him desolation and great darkness—and his soul was not shaken. His countrymen were thrilled with instant, profound and universal sympathy. Masterful in his mortal weakness, he became the center of a nation's love enshrined in the prayers of a world. But all the world and all the sympathy could not share with him his suffering. He trod the wine-press alone. With unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the divine decree. As the end drew near his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's changing wonders; on its far sails, whitening the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a farther shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning. -Fames G. Blaine. His own mild Keystone State, sedate and prim. To all around him. By a mighty will He stands, untril spring, tardy with relief, Unlocks the icy gate, And the pale prisoners thread the world once more, To the steep cliffs of Greenland's pastoral shore Bearing their dying chief. Time was when he should gain his spurs of gold From royal hands, who wooed the knightly state; The knell of old formalities is tolled, And the world's knights are now self-consecrate. No grander episode doth chivalry hold In all its annals, back to Charlemagne, Than that lone vigil of unceasing pain, Faithfully kept through hunger and through cold, By the good Christian knight, ELISHA KANE. -Fitz-James O'Brien. Washington Allston. HE element of beauty which in thee Was a prevailing spirit, pure and high, And from all guile had made thy being free, For nature's priests we shed no idle tear: Their mantles on a noble lineage fall: Though thy white locks at length have pressed the bier Death could not fold thee in oblivion's pall: Majestic forms thy hand in grace arrayed Eternal watch shall keep beside thy tomb, And hues aerial, that thy pencil stayed, Its shades with heaven's radiance illume: Art's meek apostle, holy is thy sway, From the heart's records ne'er to pass away. -Henry Theodore Tuckerman. W Daniel Webster. WHEN, stricken by the freezing blast, A nation's living pillars fall, How rich the storied page, how vast, A word, a whisper, can recall ! No medal lifts its fretted face, Nor speaking marble cheats your eye; A roof beneath the mountain pines; A mound beside the heaving main. Count the swift arc of seventy years, His frame is dust; his task is done. Yet pause upon the noontide hour, No gloom that stately shape can hide, Ere from the fields by valor won The battle smoke had rolled away, And bared the blood-red setting sun, His eyes were opened on the day. IFE may be given in many ways As bravely in the closet as the field, But then to stand beside her, Abraham Lincoln. Who stand 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, Wept with the passion of an angry grief; To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, Save on some worn-out plan, For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, And brave old wisdom of sincerity They knew 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. Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Could Nature's equal scheme deface; 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 innate weakness there must be So always firmly he: He knew to bide his time, And can his fame abide, Still patient in his simple faith sublime, Great captains, with their guns and drums, 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. -James Russell Lowell. γου Abraham Lincoln.* FOULLY ASSASSINATED APRIL 14, 1865. OU lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier, You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace, Broad for the self-complacent British sneer, His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face, His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair, His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease, His lack of all we prize as debonair, Of power or will to shine, of art to please; You, whose smart pen backed up the pencil's laugh, Judging each step as though the way were plain, Reckless, so it could point its paragraph, Of chief's perplexity, or people's pain: Beside this corpse, that bears for winding sheet Yes; he had lived to shame me from my sneer, *This tribute appeared in the London "Punch," which, up to the time of the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, had ridiculed and maligned him with all its well-known powers of pen and pencil. My shallow judgment I had learned to rue, Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame. He went about his work-such work as few If but that will we can arrive to know, So he went forth to battle, on the side That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's, As in his peasant boyhood he had plied His warfare with rude Nature's thwarting mights; The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil, The iron-bark that turns the lumberer's ax, The ambushed Indian, and the prowling bear Such were the deeds that helped his youth to train. Rough culture, but such trees large fruit may bear, If but their stocks be of right girth and grain. So he grew up, a destined work to do, And lived to do it; four long suffering years, Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through, And then he heard the hisses changed to cheers. John C. Fremont. 'HY error, Fremont, simply was to act THX A brave man's part, without the statesman's And, taking counsel but of common sense, To that Dark Power whose underlying crime The ground for truth's seed, or forerun their years Till lost in distance, or with stout hearts make A lane for freedom through the level spears, Still take thou courage! God has spoken through thee, Irrevocable, the mighty words, Be free! The land shakes with them, and the slave's dull ear Ruffling the Gulf; or like a scroll roll back -John Greenleaf Whittier. Washington Irving. HAT! Irving! thrice welcome, warm heart and You bring back the happiest spirit from Spain, [will, Throw in all of Addison minus the chill, Let stand out of doors till a soul it receives And you'll find a choice nature, not wholly deserving A name either English or Yankee-just Irving. H WOW beautiful it was, that one bright day In the long week of rain! Though all its splendor could not chase away The omnipresent pain. Hawthorne. The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, And the great elms o'erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms, Shot through with golden thread. |