(See biographical sketch on page 146)
Some years ago, while editing Henry C. Whitney's "Life of Lincoln" I
showed a photograph of the bust of Lincoln by Johannes Gelert, the most
intellectual to my mind of all the studies of his face, to a little
Italian shoeblack, and asked him if he knew who it was. The boy,
evidently prompted by a recent lesson at school, said questioningly,
"Whittier?--Longfellow?" I replied, "No, it is Lincoln, the great
President." He answered, "Well, he looks like a poet, anyway."
This verified a conclusion to which I had already come: Lincoln, had
he lived in a region of greater culture, such as New England, might
not have adopted the engrossing pursuits of law and politics, but, as
did Whittier, have remained longer on the farm and gradually taken up
the calling of letters, composing verse of much the same order as our
Yankee bards', and poetry of even higher merit than some produced.
It is not generally known that Lincoln, shortly before he went to
Congress, wrote verse of a kind to compare favorably with the early
attempts of American poets such as those named. Thus the two poems of
his which have been preserved, for his early lampoons on his neighbors
have happily been lost, are equal in poetic spirit and metrical art to
Whittier's "The Prisoner for Debt," to which they are strikingly
similar in melancholic mood.
In 1846, at the age of 37, Lincoln conducted a literary correspondence
with a friend, William Johnson by name, of like poetic tastes. In
April of this year he wrote the following letter to Johnson:
Tremont, April 18, 1846.
FRIEND JOHNSTON: Your letter, written some six weeks since,
was received in due course, and also the paper with the
parody. It is true, as suggested it might be, that I have
never seen Poe's "Raven"; and I very well know that a parody
is almost entirely dependent for its interest upon the
reader's acquaintance with the original. Still there is
enough in the polecat, self-considered, to afford one
several hearty laughs. I think four or five of the last
stanzas are decidedly funny, particularly where Jeremiah
"scrubbed and washed, and prayed and fasted."
I have not your letter now before me; but, from memory, I
think you ask me who is the author of the piece I sent you,
and that you do so ask as to indicate a slight suspicion
that I myself am the author. Beyond all question, I am not
the author. I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to
be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is. Neither
do I know who is the author. I met it in a straggling form
in a newspaper last summer, and I remember to have seen it
once before, about fifteen years ago, and this is all I know
about it.
The piece of poetry of my own which I alluded to, I was led
to write under the following circumstances. In the fall of
1844, thinking I might aid some to carry the State of
Indiana for Mr. Clay, I went into the neighborhood in that
State in which I was raised, where my mother and only sister
were buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen
years.
That part of the country is, within itself, as unpoetical as
any spot of the earth; but still, seeing it and its objects
and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly
poetry; though whether my expression of those feelings is
poetry is quite another question. When I got to writing,
the change of subject divided the thing into four little
divisions or cantos, the first only of which I send you now,
and may send the others hereafter.
Yours truly,
A. LINCOLN.
My childhood's home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There's pleasure in it too.
O Memory! thou midway world
'Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise,
And, freed from all that's earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle
All bathed in liquid light.
As dusky mountains please the eye
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-notes that, passing by,
In distance die away;
As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar--
So memory will hallow all
We've known but know no more.
Near twenty years have passed away
Since here I bid farewell
To woods and fields, and scenes of play,
And playmates loved so well.
Where many were, but few remain
Of old familiar things;
But seeing them to mind again
The lost and absent brings.
The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray;
And half of all are dead.
I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I'm living in the tombs.
In September he wrote the following letter:
Springfield, September 6, 1846.
FRIEND JOHNSTON: You remember when I wrote you from Tremont
last spring, sending you a little canto of what I called
poetry, I promised to bore you with another some time. I now
fulfil the promise. The subject of the present one is an
insane man; his name is Matthew Gentry. He is three years
older than I, and when we were boys we went to school
together. He was rather a bright lad, and the son of the
rich man of a very poor neighborhood. At the age of
nineteen he unaccountably became furiously mad, from which
condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity.
When, as I told you in my other letter, I visited my old
home in the fall of 1844, I found him still lingering in
this wretched condition. In my poetizing mood, I could not
forget the impression his case made upon me. Here is the
result:
But here's an object more of dread
Than aught the grave contains--
A human form with reason fled,
While wretched life remains.
When terror spread, and neighbors ran
Your dangerous strength to bind,
And soon, a howling, crazy man,
Your limbs were fast confined;
How then you strove and shrieked aloud,
Your bones and sinews bared;
And fiendish on the gazing crowd
With burning eyeballs glared;
And begged and swore, and wept and prayed,
With maniac laughter joined;
How fearful were these signs displayed
By pangs that killed the mind!
And when at length the drear and long
Time soothed thy fiercer woes,
How plaintively thy mournful song
Upon the still night rose!
I've heard it oft as if I dreamed,
Far distant, sweet and lone,
The funeral dirge it ever seemed
Of reason dead and gone.
To drink its strains I've stole away,
All stealthily and still,
Ere yet the rising god of day
Had streaked the eastern hill.
Air held her breath; trees with the spell
Seemed sorrowing angels round,
Whose swelling tears in dewdrops fell
Upon the listening ground.
But this is past, and naught remains
That raised thee o'er the brute:
Thy piercing shrieks and soothing strains
Are like, forever mute.
Now fare thee well! More thou the cause
Than subject now of woe.
All mental pangs by time's kind laws
Hast lost the power to know.
O death! thou awe-inspiring prince
That keepst the world in fear,
Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence,
And leave him lingering here?
If I should ever send another, the subject will be a "Bear
Hunt."
Yours as ever,
A. LINCOLN.
The poem alluded to in the first letter is undoubtedly "Oh, Why Should
the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud?", by William Knox, a Scottish poet,
known to fame only by its authorship. It remained the favorite of
Lincoln until his death, being frequently alluded to by him in
conversation with his friends. Because it so aptly presents Lincoln's
own spirit it is here presented in full. During his Presidency he
said:
"There is a poem which has been a great favorite with me for
years, which was first shown me when a young man by a friend,
and which I afterwards saw and cut from a newspaper and
learned by heart. I would give a good deal to know who wrote
it, but I have never been able to ascertain."
Then, half closing his eyes, he repeated the verses:
OH, WHY SHOULD THE SPIRIT OF MORTAL
BE PROUD?
By WILLIAM KNOX.
William Knox was born at Firth, in the parish of
Lilliesleaf, in the county of Roxburghshire, on the 17th of
August, 1789. From his early youth he composed verses. He
merited the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who afforded him
pecuniary assistance. He died November 12, 1825, at the age
of thirty-six.
Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a swift-flitting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,
The flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
He passes from life to his rest in the grave.
The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,
Be scattered around and together be laid;
And the young and the old, and the low and the high
Shall molder to dust and together shall lie.
The infant a mother attended and loved,
The mother that infant's affection who proved,
The husband that mother and infant who blest,
Each, all, are away to their dwellings of rest.
The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose eye,
Shone beauty and pleasure, her triumphs are by;
And the mem'ry of those who loved her and praised
Are alike from the minds of the living erased.
The hand of the king that the scepter hath borne,
The brow of the priest that the miter hath worn,
The eye of the sage and the heart of the brave
Are hidden and lost in the depths of the grave.
The peasant whose lot was to sow and to reap,
The herdsman who climbed with his goats up the steep,
The beggar who wandered in search of his bread,
Have faded away like the grass that we tread.
The saint who enjoyed the communion of heaven,
The sinner who dared to remain unforgiven,
The wise and the foolish, the guilty and just,
Have quietly mingled their bones in the dust.
So the multitude goes like the flower or the weed
That withers away to let others succeed,
So the multitude comes, even those we behold,
To repeat every tale that has often been told.
For we are the same that our fathers have been;
We see the same sights our fathers have seen;
We drink the same streams, and view the same sun,
And run the same course our fathers have run.
The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think,
From the death we are shrinking our fathers would shrink;
To the life we are clinging they also would cling,
But it speeds from us all like a bird on the wing.
They loved, but the story we cannot unfold;
They scorned, but the heart of the haughty is cold;
They grieved, but no wail from their slumber will come;
They joyed, but the tongue of their gladness is dumb.
They died, ay, they died. We things that are now,
That walk on the turf that lies over their brow,
And make in their dwellings a transient abode,
Meet the things that they met on their pilgrimage road.
Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,
Are mingled together in sunshine and rain:
And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge,
Still follow each other like surge upon surge.
'Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath,
From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,
From the gilded salon to the bier and the shroud,--
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
"The Last Leaf," by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was also a favorite poem of
Lincoln, says Henry C. Whitney, his friend and biographer (in his
"Life of Lincoln," Vol. I, page 238):
"Over and over again I have heard him repeat:
The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
and tears would come unbidden to his eyes, probably at thought of the
grave (his mother's) at Gentryville, or that in the bend of the
Sangamo" (of Ann Rutledge, his first love, who died shortly before the
time set for their wedding, and whose memory Lincoln ever kept
sacred).
While Lincoln, so far as can be ascertained, wrote nothing in verse
after 1846, he developed in his speeches a literary style which is
poetical in the highest sense of that term. More than all American
statesmen his utterances and writings possess that classic quality
whose supreme expression is found in Greek literature. This is because
Lincoln had an essentially Hellenic mind. First of all the
architecture of his thought was that of the Greek masters, who,
whether as Phidias they built the Parthenon to crown with harmonious
beauty the Acropolis, or as Homer they recorded in swelling narrative
from its dramatic beginning the strife of the Achaeans before Troy, or
even as Euclid, they developed from postulates the relations of space,
had a deep insight into the order in which mother nature was striving
to express herself, and a reverent impulse to aid her in bodying forth
according to her methods the ideal forms of the cosmos, the world of
beauty, no less within the soul of man than without it, which was
intended by such help to be realized as a whole in the infinity of
time, and in part in the vision of every true workman. In short,
Lincoln had a profound sense of the fitness of things, that which
Aristotle, the scientific analyst of human thought and the philosopher
of its proper expression, called "poetic justice." He strove to make
his reasoning processes strictly logical, and to this end carried with
him as he rode the legal circuit not law-books, but a copy of Euclid's
geometry, and passed his time on the way demonstrating to his drivers
the theorems therein proposed. "Demonstrate" he said he considered to
be the greatest word in the English language. He constructed every one
of his later speeches on the plan of a Euclidean solution. His Cooper
Union speech on "Slavery as the Fathers Viewed It," which contributed
so largely to his Presidential nomination, was such a demonstration,
settling what was thereafter never attempted to be controverted: his
contention that the makers of the Constitution merely tolerated
property in human flesh and blood as a primitive and passing phase of
civilization, and never intended that it should be perpetuated by the
charter of the Republic.
So, too, the Gettysburg speech, brief as it is, is the statement of a
thesis, the principles upon which the Fathers founded the nation, and
of the heroic demonstration of the same by the soldiers fallen on the
field, and the addition of a moral corollary of this, the high resolve
of the living to prosecute the work until the vision of the Fathers
was realized.
In substance of thought and in form of its presentation the speech is
as perfect a poem as ever was written, and even in the minor qualities
of artistic language--rhythm and cadence, phonetic euphony, rhetorical
symbolism, and that subtle reminiscence of a great literary and
spiritual inheritance, the Bible, which stands to us as Homer did to
the ancients--it excels the finest gem to be found in poetic cabinets
from the Greek Anthology downward. Only because it was not written in
the typography of verse, with capitalized and paragraphed initial
words at the beginning of each thought-group of words, has it failed
of recognition as a poem by academic minds. Had Walt Whitman composed
the address, and printed it in the above manner, it would now appear
in every anthology of poetry published since its date. To convince of
this those conventional people who must have an ocular demonstration
of form in order to compare the address with accepted examples of
poetry, I will dare to incur the condemnation of those who rightly
look upon such a departure from Lincoln's own manner of writing the
speech as profanation, and present it in the shape of _vers libre_.
For the latter class of readers this, the greatest poem by Lincoln,
the greatest, indeed, yet produced in America, may be preferably read
in the original form on page 100 of this collection. I trust that
these, especially if they are teachers of literature, will pardon, for
the sake of others less cultivated in poetic taste, what may appear a
duplication here, unnecessary to themselves, of the address.