No more for him life's stormy conflicts,

Nor victory, nor defeat - no more time's dark

events,

Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.

But sing, poet, in our name.

Sing of the love we bore him - because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.

As they invault the coffin there,

Sing

as they close the doors of earth upon him one verse,

For the heavy hearts of soldiers.

TO THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

(1865)

BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

O, slow to smite and swift to spare,
Gentle and merciful and just!

Who, in the fear of God, didst bear

The sword of power

a nation's trust.

In sorrow by thy bier we stand,

Amid the awe that hushes all,
And speak the anguish of a land
That shook with horror at thy fall.

Thy task is done the bond are free;

We bear thee to an honored grave,

Whose noblest monument shall be

The broken fetters of the slave.

Pure was thy life; its bloody close

Hath placed thee with the sons of light, Among the noble host of those Who perished in the cause of right.

CROWN HIS BLOODSTAINED PILLOW

BY JULIA WARD HOWE

Crown his blood-stained pillow

With a victor's palm;
Life's receding billow
Leaves eternal calm.

At the feet Almighty
Lay this gift sincere;
Of a purpose weighty,
And a record clear.

With deliverance freighted
Was this passive hand,
And this heart, high-fated,
Would with love command.

Let him rest serenely

In a Nation's care,
Where her waters queenly
Make the West more fair.

In the greenest meadow
That the prairies show,
Let his marble's shadow
Give all men to know:

"Our First Hero, living,

Made his country free;
Heed the Second's giving,
Death for Liberty."

THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 1

BY WALT WHITMAN

Thus ended the attempted secession of these States; thus the four years' war. But the main things come subtly and invisibly afterward, perhaps long afterward - neither military, political, nor (great as those are), historical. I say, certain secondary and indirect results, out of the tragedy of this death, are, in my opinion, greatest. Not the event of the murder itself. Not that Mr. Lincoln strings the principal points and personages of the period, like beads, upon the single string of his career. Not that his idiosyncrasy, in its sudden appearance and disappearance, stamps this Republic with a stamp more mark'd and enduring than any yet given by any one man (more even than Washington's) — but, join'd with these, the immeasurable value and meaning of that whole tragedy lies, to me, in senses finally dearest to a nation (and here all our own) — the imaginative and artistic senses - the literary and dramatic ones. Not in any common or low meaning of those terms, but a meaning precious to the race, 1 By permission of David McKay.

and to every age. A long and varied series of contradictory events arrives at last at its highest poetic, single, central, pictorial denouement. The whole involved, baffling, multiform whirl of the secession period comes to a head, and is gather'd in one brief flash of lightning-illumination - one simple, fierce deed. Its sharp culmination, and as it were solution, of so many bloody and angry problems, illustrates those climax-moments on the stage of universal Time, where the historic Muse at one entrance, and the tragic Muse at the other, suddenly ringing down the curtain, close an immense act in the long drama of creative thought, and give it radiation, tableau, stranger than fiction. Fit radiation-fit close! How the imagination how the student loves these things! America, too, is to have them. For not in all great deaths, nor far or near not Cæsar in the Roman senatehouse, nor Napoleon passing away in the wild night-storm at St. Helena-not Paleologus, falling, desperately fighting, piled over dozens deep with Grecian corpses-not calm old Socrates, drinking the hemlock-outvies that terminus of the secession war, in one man's life, here in our midst, in our own time-that seal of the emancipation of three million slaves-that parturition and delivery of our at last really free Republic, born again, henceforth to commence its career of genuine homogeneous Union, compact, consistent with itself.

OUR SUN HATH GONE DOWN 1

BY PHOEBE CARY

Our sun hath gone down at the noonday,
The heavens are black;

And over the morning the shadows
Of night-time are back.

Stop the proud boasting mouth of the cannon,
Hush the mirth and the shout;-
God is God! and the ways of Jehovah

Are past finding out.

Lo! the beautiful feet on the mountains,

That yesterday stood;

The white feet that came with glad tidings,

Are dabbled in blood,

The Nation that firmly was settling

The crown on her head,

Sits, like Rizpah, in sackcloth and ashes,
And watches her dead.

Who is dead? who, unmoved by our wailing,
Is lying so low?

O, my Land, stricken dumb in your anguish, Do you feel, do you know,

1 By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Company,