Later a monument was built there, and when it was dedicated Sherman spoke, and Grant said: "With all his disappointments from failures on the part of those to whom he had intrusted commands, and treachery on the part of those who had gained his confidence but to betray it, I never heard him utter a complaint, nor cast a censure, for bad conduct or bad faith. It was his nature to find excuses for his adversaries. In his death the nation lost its greatest hero; in his death the South lost its most just friend."

Among the expressions of grief that passed over the land none was more elevated than the mourning cry of our Democracy's first poet, WAlt WHITMAN:

O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN

"O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart!

Oh, the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

"O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells,

Rise up for you the flag is flung - for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths - for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father!

This arm beneath your head!

It is some dream that on the deck

You've fallen cold and dead.

"My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won ; Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!

But I with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen, cold and dead."

To the instinctive Democracy of Whitman in the same year of Lincoln's death, was added the aristocratic Democracy of Lowell:

"For him her Old World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast

Of the unexhausted West,

With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,

Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
How beautiful to see

Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed,

Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead ;
One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,
Not lured by any cheat of birth,

But by his clear-grained human worth,

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.
His was no lonely mountain peak of mind,

Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,
A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;
Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,
Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,

Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.
Nothing of Europe here,

Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,
Ere any names of Serf and Peer

Could Nature's equal scheme deface

And thwart her genial will;

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 innative weakness there must be

In him who condescends to victory

Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait,

Safe in himself as in a fate.

So always firmly he :

He knew to bide his time,

And can his fame abide,

Still patient in his simple faith sublime,
Till the wise years decide.

Great captains, with their guns and drums,
Disturb our judgment for the hour,

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."

With these two tributes but one other in poetry deserves to stand, and it came as a noble retraction from the nation whose leading men had been

unable to see clearly across the sea until Lee's surrender and Booth's pistol taught them how. John Bright had spoken boldly for the Union from the first, and John Stuart Mill, to plead our cause, had left the closet for the platform; but these were single figures, society and the politicians sympathizing with the haughty slave-owners, and despising the Northern tradesmen. It was late in the war that the organ of prosperous British thought, the London Times, described those who believed in the possibility of restoring the Union as a "small knot of fanatics and sciolists." When we remember that even Gladstone believed that Davis and his supporters had created a nation, we understand something of the difficulties met by Lincoln, Adams, and Seward in their foreign relations. No nobler confession could have been made than the one Tom Taylor, a few weeks after the murder, printed in the London Punch:

"You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier! You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace,

Broad for the self-complacent 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
The stars and stripes he lived to rear anew,
Between the mourners at his head and feet,

Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you?"

Surely there is room for all. As Lincoln felt for mankind, so now every kind of men can feel for him.

"He was the Southern mother, leaning forth

At dead of night to hear the cannon roar,
Beseeching God to turn the cruel North

And break it that her son might come once more;
He was New England's maiden, pale and pure,
Whose gallant lover fell on Shiloh's plain." 1

From France, immediately after his death, came one of the most just recognitions of what formed the President's political significance. Some French liberals sent Mrs. Lincoln a medal on which part of the inscription was, "Saved the Republic, without veiling the Statue of Liberty." That he used great power without in any degree injuring the Republican system will always be a corner-stone of his fame. In his In his very last public address he pointed out that the ability of the nation to preserve itself without checking its freedom was the most hopeful lesson of the war. If Democracy is the best government, it is be

1 Maurice Thompson.