An Horatian Ode
(To Lincoln)
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 today 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 astonished 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,—
To 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 laureled Caesar's brow.
No Caesar he, whom we lament,
A man without a precedent,
Sent it would seem, 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!
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 today,
No tyrant was; so mild a sway
In one such weight who bore
Was never known before!
From "Poems of Richard Henry Stoddard"
Copyright, 1880, by Charles Scribner's Sons.
Walt Whitman, born in West Hills, Long Island, New York, May 31, 1819. He was educated in the public schools of Brooklyn and New York City. Learned the printing trade at which he worked during the summer and taught school in winter. He made long pedestrian tours through the United States and even extended his tramps through Canada. His chief work, Leaves of Grass, is a series of poems through which he earned the praise of some and the abuse of others. He visited the army when a brother was wounded and remained afterward as a volunteer nurse. Died 1892.