In the year 1865, the people of Concord gathered on the Nineteenth of
April, as had been their wont for ninety years, but this time not to
celebrate the grasping by the town of its great opportunity for freedom
and fame. The people came together in the old meeting-house to mourn for
their wise and good Chief Magistrate, murdered when he had triumphantly
finished the great work which fell to his lot. Mr. Emerson, with others
of his townsmen, spoke.
[174] _Page 331, note 1._ On the occasion of his visit to Washington
in January, 1862, Mr. Emerson had been taken to the White House by Mr.
Sumner and introduced to the President. Mr. Lincoln’s first remark was,
“Mr. Emerson, I once heard you say in a lecture that a Kentuckian seems
to say by his air and manners, ‘Here am I; if you don’t like me, the
worse for you.’”
The interview with Mr. Lincoln was necessarily short, but he left an
agreeable impression on Mr. Emerson’s mind. The full account of this
visit is printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1904, and will be
included among the selections from the journals which will be later
published.
[175] _Page 332, note 1._ Mr. Emerson’s poem, “The Visit,” shows how
terrible the devastation of the day of a public man would have seemed to
him.
[176] _Page 336, note 1._ The brave retraction by Thomas Taylor of the
hostile ridicule which _Punch_ had poured on Lincoln in earlier days
contained these verses:—
“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_?
“Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil, and confute my pen;—
To make me own this kind of princes peer,
This rail-splitter a true-born king of men.”
The whole poem is included in Mr. Emerson’s collection _Parnassus_.
[177] _Page 337, note 1._ This thought is rendered more fully in the poem
“Spiritual Laws,” and in the lines in “Worship,”—
This is he men miscall Fate,
Threading dark ways, arriving late,
But ever coming in time to crown
The truth, and hurl wrong-doers down.
[178] _Page 338, note 1._ The following letter was written by Mr. Emerson
in November, 1863, to his friend, Mr. George P. Bradford, who, as Mr.
Cabot says, came nearer to being a “crony” than any of the others:—