RkJwrafo ABRAHAM LINCOLN. A HORATIAN ODE. Not as some great captain falls To doom, by some stray ball struck dead: Of his determined men, Who must be victors then. Nor as when sink the civic great, The safer pillars of the State, Whose calm, mature, wise words With no such tears as e'er are shed Above the noblest of our dead Do we to-day deplore The man that is no more. Our sorrow hath a wider scope, Too strange for fear, too vast for hope, A wonder, blind and dumb, That waits-what is to come! Not more astounded had we been And murdered while we slept! We woke to find a mourning earth, That could affright, appall! Such thunderbolts, in other lands, No Cæsar he whom we lament, Sent, it would seem, to do Not by the weary cares of State, Which, often done in vain, Not in the dark, wild tide of war, Which rose so high, and rolled so far, Sweeping from sea to sea In awful anarchy ; Four faithful years of mortal strife, Which slowly drained the nation's life, (Yet for each drop that ran There sprang an armèd man !) Not then; but when, by measures meet, By victory, and by defeat, By courage, patience, skill, The people's fixed “We will” Had pierced, had crushed Rebellion dead, At last, when all was well, He fell, O how he fell! The time, the place, the stealing pace, It is a hideous dream! A dream? What means this pageant then? Who speak not when they meet, The flags half-mast that late so high (The stars no brightness shed, The black festoons that stretch for miles, (No house too poor to show The cannon's sudden, sullen boom, The bells that toll of death and doom, The rolling of the drums, The dreadful car that comes? Cursed be the hand that fired the shot, The frenzied brain that hatched the plot, Thy country's Father slain Be thee, thou worse than Cain! Tyrants have fallen by such as thou, And good hath followed-may it now! (God lets bad instruments Produce the best events.) But he, the man we mourn to-day, Cool should he be, of balanced powers, Impatient, headstrong, wild, And this he was, who most unfit Such rustic manners, speech uncouth, (That somehow blundered out the truth,) Untried, untrained to bear The more than kingly care. Ay! And his genius put to scorn To what, untaught, he knew, The People, of whom he was one. (Whose bones, methinks, make room, A laboring man, with horny hands, But did as poor men do. One of the People! Born to be Their curious epitome; To share yet rise above Their shifting hate and love. Common his mind, (it seemed so then,) No hasty fool, of stubborn will, Who since his work was good Doubting, was not ashamed to doubt, And was, of course, at fault; Heard all opinions, nothing loth, But watchful, clement, kind. |