Abraham Lincoln

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Title: Abraham Lincoln.
An Horatian Ode.
Author: Richard Henry Stoddard
Release Date: June 13, 2006 [EBook #18573]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ABRAHAM
LINCOLN. ***
Produced by The University of Michigan's Making of America
online
book collection (http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moa/).
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
An Horatian Ode.
By Richard Henry Stoddard.
New York:
Bunce & Huntington, Publishers,
540 Broadway.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865,
By BUNCE & HUNTINGTON,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of
New York.
Alvord, Printer.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
Born, Feb. 12th, 1809.
Assassinated, Good-Friday, April 14th, 1865.
"Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!
Most sacrilegious
murder hath broke ope
The Lord's anointed temple, and stole thence

The life o' the building.

"Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight
With a new
Gorgon:--Do not bid me speak;
See, and then speak
yourselves.--Awake! awake!
Ring the alarum-bell:--Murder! and
treason!

"Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit,
And look on death
itself!--up, up, and see
The great doom's image!

"Our royal master's murdered!

"Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time;
for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but

toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the
mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.
0. * *
"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst:
nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can
touch him further."
Macbeth.
Not as when some great Captain falls
In battle, where his Country
calls,
Beyond the struggling lines
That push his dread designs
To doom, by some stray ball struck dead:
Or, in the last charge, at the
head
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
Suppress the need of swords--
With no such tears as e'er were 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
If Madness, that dark night, unseen,
Had in our chambers crept,
And murdered while we slept!

We woke to find a mourning Earth--
Our Lares shivered on the
hearth,--
The roof-tree fallen,--all
That could affright, appall!
Such thunderbolts, in other lands,
Have smitten the rod from royal
hands,
But spared, with us, till now,
Each laurelled Cesar's brow!
No Cesar he, whom we lament,
A Man without a precedent,
Sent, it would see, to do
His work--and perish too!
Not by the weary cares of State,
The endless tasks, which will not
wait,
Which, often done in vain,
Must yet be done again:
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 fateful years of mortal strife,
Which slowly drained the Nation's
life,
(Yet, for each drop that ran
There sprang an armed 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,--
Without a Hand, without
a Head:--
At last, when all was well,
He fell--O, _how_ he fell!

The time,--the place,--the stealing Shape,--
The coward shot,--the
swift escape,--
The wife--the widow's scream,--
It is a hideous Dream!
A Dream?--what means this pageant, then?
These multitudes of
solemn men,
Who speak not when they meet,
But throng the silent street?
The flags half-mast, that late so high
Flaunted at each new victory?
(The stars no brightness shed,
But bloody looks the red!)
The black festoons that stretch for miles,
And turn the streets to
funeral aisles?
(No house too poor to show
The Nation's badge of woe!)
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
By 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,
No tyrant was: so mild a sway
In one such weight who bore
Was never known before!

Cool should he be, of balanced powers,
The Ruler of a Race like ours,
Impatient, headstrong, wild,--
The Man to guide the Child!
And this _he_ was, who most unfit
(So hard the sense of God to hit!)
Did seem to fill his