Classic Poem

I

There runs a simple argument
That, with the power to give a great man birth,
The insight and the exaltation
To judge him at his splendid worth
Best proves the vigor of a continent,
The blood that pulses in a nation.

We call ourselves the militant and wise
Heirs of dominion, lords of enterprise;
And that's no craven faith whose works we name:
The prairies sown, the factories aflame,
The mountain mines, the battle-fleets that came
Victorious home from islands of sunrise,
The cities towering to the windy skies —
A new-world faith that is a world's new fame.

Yet we are wiser than we think we are,
Nor walk we by that iron faith alone:
God and the west wind and the morning star
And manhood still are more than steel or stone.
And among the proofs of what we do inherit
In the dominion of the spirit,
Through that material uproar, toil, and strife
Of our vast people's life,
There is a story, eloquent and low,
Waiting the consecrated scroll and pen,
More lovely, more momentous than we dream:
How, year by year, behind the blare and show,
Lincoln has prospered in the hearts of men;
And a great love compels me to the theme.

II

I stood among the watchers by the bed,
And caught the solemn cry of Stanton, when,
A statesman gifted with a prophet's ken,
Stanton looked up to God and said,
On the first moment the gaunt form lay dead,
" Now he belongs unto the ages! " — then,
Transfigured to a little child again,
Bowed in his hands that grim, defiant head.

III

I marked a people, hearing what had come,
Whisper, as if Death housed in every street,
And look in each other's faces and grow dumb;
While, with the Stars and Stripes for winding sheet,
And roses and lilies at his head and feet,
He crossed the valleys to the muffled drum.
And still the white-haired mothers tell
How knell of bell and tolling bell,
Onward and overland,
On from the ocean strand,
Over the misty ridges,
Over the towns and bridges,
Over the river ports,
Over the farms and forts,
Mingled their airy music, far and high,
With April sunset and the evening sky.

IV

Grief mellowed into love at Time's eclipse,
Our loftiest love from out our loftiest grief:
From him we have named the mountains and the ships,
We have named our children from the martyred chief;
And, whilst we write his works and words of state
For the proud archives of the Country's great,
How often it seems we like to linger best
Around the little things he did or said,
The quaint and kindly shift, the homespun jest,
Dear random memories of a father dead;
His image is in the cottage and the hall,
A tattered print perhaps, a bronze relief,
One calm and holy influence over all,
A household god that guards an old Belief;
And in a mood divine,
Elder than Christian psalm or pagan rite,
We have made his birthplace now the Nation's shrine,
Fencing the hut that bore him in the night,
As 'twere the mausoleum of a Line,
With granite colonnades and walls forever white.

V

And poets, walking in the open places,
By marsh, or meadow, or Atlantic seas,
Twined him with Nature in their harmonies —
Folk-hero of the last among the races,
As elemental as the rocks and trees;
One of the world's old legendary faces,
Moving amid Earth's unknown destinies.
To Lowell he became like Plutarch's men,
Yet worked in sweetest clay from out the breast
Of the unexhausted West;
In Whitman's nocturne at the twilight hush
He seems a spirit come to dwell again
With odor of lilac and star and hermit thrush;
And, though the goodly hills of song grow dim
Beyond the smoke and traffic of to-day,
The poets somehow found the ancient way
And reached the summits when they sang of him.

VI

The sculptors dropped their measuring rods,
Their cunning chisels from the gods,
From woman in her marble nakedness,
From what they carved of flowing veil or dress,
Perceiving something they might not contemn,
A majesty of unsolved loveliness,
Standing between the eternal sun and them.
And, in his gnarled face,
With shaggy brow and bearded base,
The corded hand, the length and reach of limb,
Their generous handicraft
Has proved how well they saw
No antic Nature's curious sport or whim
Who made him as she laughed,
But strict adjustment after subtlest law —
To finer sense a firm and ordered whole,
An output of a soul,
A frame, a visage for delight and awe,
Even were it not also witness unto Time
Of deeds sublime.
Thus, true of eye and hand,
The sculptors gave his statues to the land.

VII

One stands in Boston's crowded square,
Stern to rebuke and pitiful to save,
One moment of his labors it stands there,
And from its feet is rising up the slave;
One by Chicago's noisy highway stands,
As if pronouncing on a civic fate,
Seeming to view a people's outstretched hands,
Seeming to feel the armies at the gate.
And now ... and here ...
In the young summer of the hundredth year,
So beautiful and still,
The scholar (he who learns to wait
For meanings than the rest more clear)
Unveils upon the everlasting hill,
With everlasting sky around its head,
Between the woodland inland waters,
Fronting a domed city spread
In yonder distance like a garden bed,
This mighty Presence for our sons and daughters,
That shows him not in what he wrought,
But in the lonely grandeur of that trust
Which made him patient, strong, and just —
Yet seated, forever out of reach of aught
Of olden battles and the dread debate,
Whatever thunder comes or tempest blows;
Watching some Planet off the shores of Thought,
Not parted from but still above the state,
In long supremacy of high repose.