between office students and Mr. Herndon concerning its poetic merit, in which Dr. Bateman engaged with us, having entered from his adjoining office. Later, quite a surprise occurred when we found that the Whitman poetry and our discussions had been engaging Lincoln's silent attention. After the rest of us had finished our criticism of some peculiar verses and of Whitman in general, as well as of each other's literary taste and morals in particular, and had resumed our usual duties or had departed, Lincoln, who during the criticism had been apparently in the unapproachable depths of one of his glum moods of meditative silence, took up 'Leaves of Grass' for his first reading of it. After half an hour or more devoted to it he turned back to the first pages and, to our general surprise, began to read aloud. Other office work was discontinued by us all when he read with sympathetic emphasis verse after verse. His rendering revealed a charm of new life in Whitman's versification. Save for a few comments on some broad allusions that Lincoln suggested could have been veiled, or left out, he commended the new poet's verses for their virility, freshness, unconventional sentiments, and unique forms of expression, and claimed that Whitman gave promise of a new school of poetry."

Some years later William Douglas O'Connor, then a young journalist in Washington but later author of a masterly defense of Whitman and a scorching rebuke to Secretary of the Interior Harlan for discharging Whitman from office on account of his poems, records the following incident:

"I treasure to my latest hour," he writes, "with swelling heart and springing tears, the remembrance of Abraham Lincoln seeing him (Whitman) for the first time from the window of the East Room of the White House as he passed slowly by, and gazing at him long with that deep eye which read men,

saying in the quaint sweet tone which those who have spoken with him will remember, and with a significant emphasis which type can hardly convey, 'Well, he looks like a MAN.'

Lincoln ministering in the White House to the wounds of a Nation battling for its life, and Whitman in the camps and hospitals about Washington devoting his heart and soul to the wounded of our armies-two supremely lovely souls, on their journey toward their destined goal! What further. Listen to O'Connor again in his estimate of Whitman's poetry:

"I know of nothing superior to 'Bivouac's Fitful Flame,' 'Ashes of Soldiers,' the 'Spirit whose Work Is Done,' the prelude to 'Drum Taps,' that most mournful and noble of all love songs, 'Out of the Rolling Ocean The Crowd,' or 'Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking,' 'Elemental Drifts,' the entire section entitled, 'Song of Myself,' the hymn commencing "Splendor of Falling Day,' or the great salute to the French Revolution of '93 entitled, 'France.' And if all these were wanting there is a poem in the volume which, if the author had never written another line, would be sufficient to place him among the chief poets of the world. I do not refer to 'Chanting The Square Deific,' though that also would be sufficient in its incomparable breadth and grandeur of conception and execution to establish the highest poetic reputation, but the strain commemorating the death of the beloved President, commencing, 'When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,' a poem whose rich and sacred beauty and rapture of tender religious passion, spreading aloft into the sublime, leave it unique and solitary in literature, and will make it the chosen and immortal hymn of Death forever. Emperors might elect to die could their memories be surrounded with such a Requiem, which, next to the grief and love of the

people, is the grandest and only grand funeral music poured around Lincoln's bier."

Shall we leave to chance Lincoln's recognition of Whitman as a great poet when all the world was deriding him?-to chance the passing of Whitman before the President who recognized instantly his individual nobility?-to chance the sacrifices both made for humanity and in the name of the Union? to chance the preparation of Whitman through those four years of woeful experience among the wounded, the maimed, the dying, that he might have his soul attuned to that wonderful chant of Death? Was it chance that gave to those terrific years those two men pre-visioning universal democracy; to one of them to establish it and give his life for it, and to the other to live to sing the Apocalypse of the Religion of Democracy in his perfected "Leaves of Grass"? If this be so, then we may cast to the winds our system of logic as well as our faith in a Creator Whose Intelligence marshals the hosts of heaven and marks the fall of the sparrow.

Search through all the world and the histories of it and there will be found no other two men beside whom these two are not worthy to stand. Standing side by side there is no disparaging thought. They are Democracy.

Chapter XI

THE HOUSE DIVIDED

HOUSE divided against itself! People saw it now for

A

the first time. Yet it was no new thing. It had been in

the Constitution from the first. A declaration of principles had been promulgated that pronounced all men to be born free, and yet later the same Constitution had accepted a proviso that allowed some men to be chattels. It had given legal sanction to ownership in men in one part of the Union and had prohibited it in another. It had put a ban on the importation of men from a foreign country to be sold as slaves, but had not made the sale of slaves born within the states illegal.

In the Constitutional Convention, it was the plan that New England was to let slavery alone, and we must remember that it was Mason of Virginia who was so enraged and so opposed to slavery, that he arose and delivered one of the most significant speeches heard in the Constitutional Convention—the more significant coming from a delegate from a state owning more than a third of all the slaves in the United States. Mason exclaimed:

"This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of British merchants. The British Government constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it. The present question concerns not the importing states, but the whole Union

Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigration of Whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effects upon manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven upon a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities."

But a warning of awful calamity to come was not so effective with the majority, as was the desire to frame an instrument competent to establish a National Government-and which could be ratified. The compromise was completed by extending the slave importation period to twenty years, and placing a head tax on all slaves imported-and Mason refused to sign the Constitution.

The Union indivisible hid the seed of divisibility in its original organism. The house was divided against itself primarily before the architects had finished drawing the plans. The unforgivable sin had its roots in the birth of the nation. The clear-eyed fathers of the Republic saw this plainly enough and shuddered at the thought of a democracy founded on the primal law of God, a free man, yet retaining in its Constitution an acceptance of a condition which allowed one man to bind another after his own ideas of truth and justice, unsupported by, and contrary to, the "Declaration" that "all men are created equal" under the benignant smile of Life, which presupposed liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But they also shrank with horror at the prospect of Colonial anarchy. Better a Union with one flaw in its Constitution than no Union with all its attendant evils. They acknowledged the conditions which they could not square