The main effect of this poem is of strong solemn, and varied music; and
it involves in its construction a principle after which perhaps the
great composers most work--namely, spiritual auricular analogy. At first
it would seem to defy analysis, so rapt is it, and so indirect. No
reference whatever is made to the mere fact of Lincoln's death; the poet
does not even dwell upon its unprovoked atrocity, and only occasionally
is the tone that of lamentation; but, with the intuitions of the grand
art, which is the most complex when it seems most simple, he seizes upon
three beautiful facts of nature, which he weaves into a wreath for the
dead President's tomb. The central thought is of death, but around this
he curiously twines, first, the early-blooming lilacs which the poet may
have plucked the day the dark shadow came; next the song of the hermit
thrush, the most sweet and solemn of all our songsters, heard at
twilight in the dusky cedars; and with these the evening star, which, as
many may remember, night after night in the early part of that eventful
spring, hung low in the west with unusual and tender brightness. These
are the premises whence he starts his solemn chant.
The attitude, therefore, is not that of being bowed down and weeping
hopeless tears, but of singing a commemorative hymn, in which the voices
of nature join, and fits that exalted condition of the soul which
serious events and the presence of death induce.