Happyheart
AMID a waste of worn-out apple trees,
In doorless ruin, nigh a grass-grown road
Set far from every tumult of to-day,
Stands yet the house where Happyheart was born.
That day, his mother told him once, she wept,
Boding what gusty fates must threat the babe
Who lay as musing all delightedly
To hear the strangest storm she ever knew.
For while a norther hammered on the walls,
Tore crusted snow, whirled orchard branches off,
Pelted the shuttered windows, wailed dismay,
Clear blue and sunshine held the winter sky.
And, happy in the southward lee, she saw
The earliest singing sparrow of the spring
Hop on her sill, chanting melodiously,
Full glad of shelter in the warming beams.
“The bird is his,”—declared the Irish nurse,
“Great luck indeed! See, will he notice it?”
Speaking, she turned the new-born man-child’s face
In such a wise his wondering mother saw
Within the steady eyes a tiny scene,—
The panes, the singing bird, the whirling world,
Trees madly thrashing, wracks of hurrying drift
Crossing the clear, eternal, sunlit sky.
“What? Crying? Troth, but this will never do!
Sure he takes notice of the bird, I’ll swear!
Cheer up! ’T is happy fortune will be his!
There’s not a child in all the land so blest
As him the winter songbird hastens to!”
And still the mother wept, she knew not why.
Within the portals of his house of birth
Has Happyheart beheld the snow wraiths reel,
While in the azure height of clear divine
The sun swung loudly o’er no loneliness
More chill than stared about the scene forlorn;
And yet the eyes his mother wept to see
Pictured fine gleams through every clouding wrack,
Infinite calm, and singers wonderful.
The Mandan Priest
THEY call me now the Indian Priest,
Their fathers' fathers did not so,
The very Mandan name hath ceased
From speech since fifty years ago;
I am so old my fingers fail
My trembling rosary beads to tell,
Yet all my years do not avail
My Mandan memories to quell.
The whole flat world I've seen how changed
Within my lifetime's hundred years;
O'er plains where herding buffalo ranged
Came strange new grass with white men's steers,
The lowing cattle passed as dreams,
Their pastures reared a farmer race,
Now city windows flash their gleams
Nigh our old Monastery's place.
The Prior gives to me no more
Even a task of inward praise,
The Brethren bear me through our door
To bask me here on summer days;
I am so old I cannot kneel,
I cannot hear, I cannot see,
Often I wonder if I feel
The very sunbeams warming me.
Yet do I watch the Mandan dogs
And Mandan ponies slain for meat
That year the squaws chewed snakes and frogs
That babes might tug a living teat,
And Mandan braves, in daylight dance,
Gashed side and arm and painted breast
Praying The Manitou might trance
No more the buffalo from their quest.
A circled plain all horse-high grassed
Our mounting scouts beheld at dawn,
They saw naught else though far they passed
Apart before the sun was gone;
Each night's ride back through starlit lanes
They saw the tepee sparks ascend,
And hoped, and sniffed, and knew their pains
Of famine had not yet an end.
Alone within his magic tent
The new-made Midi wrought the spell
That soothed Life's Master to relent
In years the Old remembered well.
He cried,–'The Mission Priests have wreaked
Some curse that balks the Ancient Art!'
'Thou useless Fool,' the war-chief shrieked,
And sped the knife-thrust to his heart.
With that, 'What comes?' my mother screamed–
How quick the squatted braves arose!
Far in the south the tallest deemed
He saw the flight of up-scared crows;
Above the horse-high grass came slow
A lifted Cross, a tonsured head,–
And what the meaning none could know
Until the black-robed rider said:–
'Mandans, I bear our Mission's word,–
Your children, brought to us, shall eat.'
Scarce had the fierce young War-chief heard
Ere fell the Blackrobe from his seat;
The Chief held high the reeking knife,
He frowned about the Woman's Ring,
And yet my mother's face took life
Anew in pondering the thing.
She stole at night the dead Priest's scrip,
His meagre wallet's hard-baked food,
His crucifix, his waist-rope strip
All blackened with his martyr blood;
Through dark, day-hidden, hand in hand,
We traced his trail for ninety mile,
She starved herself that I might stand,
She spoke me comfort all the while:–
'So shalt thou live, my little son,
The white men's magic shalt thou learn,
And when the hungry moons are run,
Be sure thy mother shall return;
Oh, sweet my joy when, come again,
I find thy Mandan heart untamed,
As fits a warrior of the plain,
That I, thy mother, be not shamed.'
She left me while the black-robed men
Blest and beseeched her sore to stay;
No voice hath told my heart since then
How fared my mother's backward way.
Years, years within the Mission School,
By love, by prayer they gained my heart;
It held me to Our Order's rule,
From all the Mandan life apart.
From tribe to tribe, through sixty years,
The Mandan Priest for Christ he wrought,
And many an Indian heart to tears,
And many a soul to God he brought;
Yet do I hear my mother's voice
Soft lingering round her little son,
And, O dear Lord, dost Thou rejoice
In all my mother's child hath done?
The Many Mansioned House
THERE looms, upon the enormous round
Where nations come and nations go,
A many-mansioned house, whose bound
Ranges so wide that none may know
Its temperate lands of corn and vine,
Its solitudes of Arctic gloom,
Its wealth of forest, plain, and mine,
Its jungle world of tropic bloom.
Yet so its architects devise
That still its boundary walls extend,
And still its guardian forts arise,
And still its builders see no end
Of plan, or labor, or the call
By which the Master of their Fate
Urges to lay the advancing wall
Of Law beyond the farthest gate.
The mortar oft is red with blood
Of men within and men without,
For hate’s incessant storm and flood
Rage round each uttermost redoubt,
And bullets sing, and shrieks are loud,
And bordering voices curse the hour
That sees the builders onward crowd,
True to the Master Mind, whose power
Impels them build by plumb and line
To give the blood-stained wall increase
And forward push the huge design
Within whose mansions dwelleth peace.
The Master Mind is in no place,
It hath no settled rank nor name,
Its mood, as moulded by the race,
Shifts often, yet remains the same
To meditate what millions think,
And shape the deed to fit their thought,
Now raising high who seemed to sink,
Now flinging down their choice as naught.
It lauds what sons obey its calls
When time has come for hands to smite,
And when the hour to cease befalls
It chastens them it did requite;
Yet still so chooses that the change
From war to peace and peace to war
Confirms the mansions in their range,
And builds the far-built wall more far.
Within the many mansions dwell
Nations diverse of tongue and blood,—
Races whose primal anthems tell
How Ganges grew a sacred flood,
Tribes long fore-fathered when the birds
Of Egypt saw Osiris pass,
They that were ancient when the herds
Of Abraham cropped Chaldean grass,
People whose shepherd-priesthoods saw
The might of Nineveh begin,
And folk whose slaves baked mud and straw
Mid Babylon’s revelling fume of sin;
Blacks that have served in every age
Since first the yoke of Ham they wore,
Yellows who set the printed page
Ere Homer sang from shore to shore,
Swart Browns whose glittering kreeses held
In dread the far-isled Asian seas,
Fierce Reds who waged from primal eld
Their stealthy warfare of the trees;
Men of the jaguar-haunted swamp
Whose mountain masters dwelt in pride
Of golden-citied Aztec pomp
Ages ere Montezuma died;
Builders whose blood was in the hands
That propped the circled Druid stones,
And Odin-fathered men, whose bands
Storming all winds, laid warrior bones
Round all the Roman mid-world sea,
And held the Cæsars’ might in scorn,
And kept the Viking liberty
That fairer freedom might be born.
The wall defendeth all alike,
The Master Mind on all ordains:—
Within my bound no sword shall strike,
Nor fetter bind, save law arraigns;
No prisoner here shall feel the rack,
No infant be to slavery born,
The wage shall labor’s sweat not lack,
Nor skill of just reward be shorn.
The king and hind alike shall stand
Within the peril of my law,
And though it change at time’s demand
Shall every change be held in awe.
Here every voice may freely speak
Wisdom or folly as it choose,
And though the strong must lead the weak,
The weak may yet the strong refuse;
Thus shall no change be wrought before
The wise who seek a better way
Can win, to share their vision, more
Than praise the wise who wish delay,—
That so the Master Mind be strong
Through every drift of time and change,
To fashion either right or wrong
At will, within the mansions’ range.
Of what is wrong and what is right
The Master Mind doth ceaseless hear,
Listens intent to counselling might,
Pity or fury, hope or fear,
Sways to the evil, yet repents,
Sways to the good, yet half denies,
Follows revenge, but quick relents,
And makes its wondering foes allies;
In memory sees its frenzied hours,
And holds those fury-fits in scorn;
In gentlest aspiration towers,
Or grovels as of faith forlorn,
Yet never, never loses quite
The thought, the hope, the glory-dream,
That beacon of supernal light,
The shining, holy Grail-like beam,
The Ideal—in which alone it dares
Advance the circuit of the wall—
The faith that yet shall happy shares
Of circumstance be won for all,—
This is the vision of its law,
This is the Asgard of its dream—
That what the world yet never saw
Of justice shall arise supreme.
The Master Mind proclaims as free
Alike, all creeds that men may name,
All worships they devise to be
Their help in hope, or ease in shame;
In Buddha, Mahmoud, Moses, Christ,
Outspokenly may any trust,
Or he whom no belief enticed
May hold the soul a dream of dust,
Yet all alike be free to teach,
And all alike be free to shun,
Because the law of freeman’s speech
Impartial guardeth every one;
If but all rites of blood be banned,
Then may each life select its God,
And every congregation stand
Past dread of persecution’s rod,—
Lo now! Is thus not Jesus set
Transcendent o’er the broad domain—
The gentle Christ whose anguished sweat
Bled for a world-wide mercy’s reign?
Yet in many Mansions flaunt,
As if they deem their place secure,
Legion, whose Christ-defying vaunt
How long, O Lord, dost Thou endure!
Belshazzar’s Feast is multiplied,
Mammon holds fabulous parade,
Thousands of Minotaurs divide
The procurers’ tribute of the maid,
Circe enchants her votary swine,
Moloch, though veiled his fire, consumes,
And all the man-made Gods assign
Their victims self-elected dooms.
In large, the suffering and the sin
(Full well the Master Mind doth know),
From luxury and want begin,
And through unequal portions flow.
This ancient wrong doth worst defeat
The immortal yearning of His plea
To save the little, wandering feet,—
“Suffer the children come to me”;
Wherefore, on streets that Mammon makes
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The Master Mind bends ruthless eye,
Yet calm withholds the blow that breaks,
And leaves that stroke to by and by,
Since faithful memory, backward cast,
Beholds how much hath freedom won,
And lest a pomp-destroying blast
Might shrivel many a guiltless one,
And since it knows that freedom’s plan
To build secure alone is skilled,
And that firm-grounded gain for man
Is only by what man hath willed.—
Hence waits the Master Mind, in trust
That yet the hour shall Mammon rue,
Since, as the mansions grow, so must
Freedom upraise The Christ anew.
But whether He prevail at last,
Or whether all shall pass away,
Even as Rome’s great Empire passed
When wrought the purpose of its day,
Still must the builders heed the call
By which the Master of all Fate
Ordains they lay the advancing wall
Of peace beyond the farthest gate.
And, oh! the Master Mind may well
In pride of gentleness rejoice
That in the Mansions none may quell
The lilt of any nation’s voice;
But every race may sing their joy,
May hymn their pride, their glories boast
To listeners glad without alloy—
The primal, wall-extending host,
The founding, freedom-loving race
Whose generous-visioning mind doth see
No worth in holding foremost place,
Save in an Empire of the Free.
When Lincoln Died
ALREADY Appomattox day
Seemed to our hearts an age away,
Although the April-blossomed trees
Were droning with the very bees
That bumbled round the conference
Where Lee resigned his long defence,
And Grant’s new gentleness subdued
The iron Southern fortitude.
From smouldering leaves the smoky smell
Wreathed round Virginian fields a spell
Of homely aromatic haze,
So like New Hampshire springtime days
About the slopes of Moosilauke
It numbed my homesick heart to talk,
And when the bobolinks trilled “Rejoice!”
My comrade could not trust his voice.
We were two cavalrymen assigned
To safeguard Pinckney womankind,
Whose darkies rambled Lord knows where
In some persuasion that they were
Thenceforth, in ease, at public charge
To live as gentlemen at large—
A purpose which, they’d heard, the war
Was made by “Massa Linkum” for.
The pillared mansion, battle-wrecked,
Yet stood with ivied front erect,
Its mossy gables, shell-fire-torn,
Were still in lordliness upborne
Above the neighboring barns, well stored
With war-time’s rich tobacco hoard;
But on the place, for food, was naught
Save what our commissary brought
To keep the planter’s folk alive
Till Colonel Pinckney might arrive
Paroled from northward, if his head
Lay not among the prisoner dead.
We’d captured him ten days before,
When Richard Ewell’s veteran corps,
Half-naked, starving, fought amain
To save their dwindling wagon-train.
Since they were weak and we were strong,
The battle was not overlong.
Again I see the prisoners stare
Exultant at the orange glare
Of sunlit flame they saw aspire
Up from the train they gave to fire.
They’d shred apart their hero flags
To share the silk as heart-worn rags.
The trampled field was strewn about
With wreckage of the closing rout—
Their dead, their wounded, rifles broke,
Their mules and horses slain in yoke;
Their torn-up records, widely spread,
Fluttered around the muddy dead—
So bitter did their hearts condemn
To ruin all we took with them.
Ten days before! The war was past,
The Union saved, Peace come at last,
And Father Abraham’s words of balm
Gentling the war-worn States to calm.
Of all the miracles he wrought
That was the sweetest. Men who’d fought
So long they’d learned to think in hate,
And savor blood when bread they ate,
And hear their buried comrades wail,
How long, O Lord, doth wrong prevail?
List’ning alike, in blue or gray,
Felt war’s wild passions soothed away.
By homely touches in the air
That morning was so sweet and rare
That Father Abraham’s soul serene
Seemed brooding over all the scene;
And when we found the plough, I guess
We were so tired of idleness
Our farmer fingers yearned to hold
The handles, and to sense the mould
Turning the earth behind the knife.
Jim gladdened as with freshened life;—
“Say, John,” said he, “I’m feeling beat
To know what these good folks will eat
When you and I are gone. Next fall
They’re sure to have no crop at all.
All their tobacco’s confiscate
By Washington—and what a state
Of poverty they’re bound to see!
Say, buddy, what if you and me
Just hitch our cavalry horses now
Up to this blamed Virginia plough,
And run some furrows through the field?
With commissary seed they’d yield
A reasonable crop of corn.”
“They will,” said I, “as sure’s you’re born!”
Quickly we rigged, with rope and straps
And saddle leathers—well, perhaps
The Yankiest harness ever planned
95
To haul a plough through farming land.
It made us kind of happy, too,
Feeling like Father Abraham knew.
The Pinckney place stood on a rise,
And when we’d turned an end, our eyes
Would see the mansion war had wrecked,—
Such desolation! I suspect
The women’s hearts were mourning sore;
But not one tear we saw—they bore
Composed the fortune fate had sent—
But, O dear Lord, how still they went!
I’ve seen such quiet in a shroud,
Inscrutably resigned and proud.
Yet, when we’d worked an hour or two,
And plain was what we meant to do,
Mother and daughters came kind-eyed,—
“Soldiers—my soldier husband’s pride
Will be to thank you well—till then
We call you friendly, helpful men—”
It seemed she stopped for fear of tears.
She turned—they went—Oh, long the years
Gone by since that brave lady spoke—
And yet I hear the voice that broke.
We watched them climb the lilac hill,
Again the spring grew strangely still
Ere, far upon the turnpike road,
Across a clattering bridge, where flowed
Through sand the stream of Pinckney Run,
We heard the galloping of one
Who, hidden by the higher ground,
Pounded as fast as horse could pound.
Then—all again was still as death—
Till up the slope, with laboring breath,
A white steed rose—his rider gray
Spurring like mad his staggering way.
The man was old and tall and white,
His glooming eyes looked dead to light,
He rode with such a fateful air
I felt a coldness thrill my hair,
He rode as one hard hit rides out
In horror from some battle rout,
Bearing a cry for instant aid—
That aspect made my heart afraid. [Page 63]
The death-like rider drew no rein,
Nor seemed to note us on the plain,
140
Nor seemed to know how weak in stride
His horse strove up the long hillside;
When down it lurched, on foot the man
Up through the fringing lilacs ran,
His left hand clutching empty air
As if his sabre still hung there.
’T was plain as day that human blast
Was Colonel Pinckney home at last,
And we were free, since ordered so
That with his coming we might go;
Yet on we ploughed—the sun swung high,
Quiet the earth and blue the sky—
Silent we wrought, as men who wait
Some half-imagined stroke of fate,
While through the trembling shine came knells
Tolling from far-off Lynchburg bells.
The solemn, thrilling sounds of gloom
Bore portents of tremendous doom,
On smoky zephyrs drifted by
Shadows of hosts in charging cry,
In fields where silence ruled profound
Growling musketry echoed round,
Pale phantom ranks did starkly pass
Invisible across the grass,
Flags ghosted wild in powder fume
Till, miracled in memory’s room,
Rang the old regiment’s rousing cheer
For Father Abraham, smiling queer.
’T was when we turned a furrow’s end
We saw a martial form descend
From Mansion Hill the lilac way,
Till in our field the veteran gray
Stood tall and straight as at parade,
And yet as one with soul dismayed.
That living emblem of the South
Faced us unblenching, though his mouth
So quivered with the spoken word
It seemed a tortured heart we heard;—
“Soldiers”—he eyed us nobly when
We stood to “attention”—“Soldiers—men,
For this good work my thanks are due—
But—men—O God—men, if you knew,
Your kindly hands had shunned the plough—
For hell comes up between us now!—
Oh, sweet was peace—but gone is peace—
185
Murder and hate have fresh release!—
The deed be on the assassin’s head!—
Men—Abraham Lincoln’s lying dead!”
He steadied then—he told us through
All of the tale that Lynchburg knew,
190
While dumbly raged my anguished heart
With woe from pity wrenched apart,
For, in the fresh red furrow, bled
’Twixt us and him the martyred dead.
That precious crimson ran so fast
195
It merged in tinge with battles past,—
Hatcher’s, Five Forks, The Wilderness,
The Bloody Angle’s maddened stress;
Down Cemetery Hill there poured
Torrents that stormed to Kelly’s Ford,
200
And twice Manassas flung its flood
To swell the four years’ tide of blood,
And Sumter blazed, and Ellsworth fell,
While memory flashed its gleams of hell.
The colonel’s staring eyes declared
205
In visions wild as ours he shared,
Until—dear Christ—with Thine was blent
The death-transfigured President. [Page 65]
Strange—strange—the crown of thorns he wore,
His outspread hands were piercèd sore,
And down his old black coat a tide
Flowed from the javelin-wounded side;
Yet ’t was his homely self there stood,
And gently smiled across the blood,
And changed the mystic stream to tears
That swept afar the angry years,
And flung me down as falls a child
Whose heart breaks out in weeping wild.
Yet in that field we ploughed no more,
We shunned the open Southern door,
We saddled up, we rode away,—
It’s that that troubles me to-day.
Full thirty years to dust were turned
Before my pondering soul had learned
The blended vision there was sent
In sign that our Belovèd meant;—
Children who wrought so mild my will,
Plough the long furrow kindly still,
’T is sweet the Father’s work to see
Done for the memory of me.
Father Abraham Lincoln
My private shrine. The Gettysburg Address
Framed in with all authentic photographs
Of him from whom the New Religion flows.
Homely? That’s it. A perfect homeliness.
Homely as Home itself that countenance
Benign, immortal sweet, his very soul,
The steadfast, common, great American.
It is a gladness in my aging heart
These eyes three times beheld himself alive,
Ungainly, jointed loose, rail-fence-like, queer
In garb that hung with scarecrow shapelessness—
Absolute figure of The States half-made,
Turning from toil and joke to sacred war.
MY heart has smiles and tears, remembering how
The boy, fourteen, round-cheeked and downy-lipped,
With Philadelphia cheese-cake freshly bit,
Halted to stare on marbled Chestnut Street;
He could not gulp the richness in his maw,
Because that black-frock-coated countryman
Of bulged umbrella, rusty stovepipe hat,
Five yards ahead, and coming rapidly,
Could be none other than the President,
From caricatures familiar as the day.
A sudden twinkle lit his downcast eyes,
Marking the cheese-cake and the staring boy;
Tickled to note the checked gastronomy,
Passing, he asked, “Good, sonny?” in a tone
Applausive more than questioning, full of fun,
Yet half-embracive, as your mother’s voice,
And smiled so comrade-like the wondering lad
Glowed with a sense of being chosen chum
To Father Abraham Lincoln, President.
Such was the miracle his spirit wrought
In millions while he lived. And still it lives.
He stalked along, unguarded, all alone,
That central soul of unremitting war,
A common man level with common Man.
The heart-warmed, wondering boy stared after him,
And wonders yet to-day on how it chanced
The mighty, well-loved, martyr President
Went rambling on unknown in broadest day
On crowded street, as if by nimbus hid
From all except the cheese-caked worshipper
He sonnied, smiled on, joked at fatherly.
That night the streets of Philadelphia thronged;
No end of faces; one great human cross,
As far each way as lamp-post boys could see,
Packed Ninth and Chestnut, waiting Father Abe;
The Continental’s balcony on high
Glowed Stars and Stripes, with crape for all the dead
“We cannot dedicate, nor consecrate.”
On chime of eight precise, gaunt, bare of head,
They saw his tallness in the balcony-flare,
And straightway all the murmurous street grew still,
Till silence absolute as death befell.
And in that perfect silence one clear voice
Inspired began, from out the multitude, [Page 40]
The song of all the songs of all the war,
Simple, ecstatic, sacrificial, strong—
“We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand
more”—
And neighboring voices took the long refrain
While some more distant raised the opening words,
Till to and fro and far and near at once,
Never in chorus, chanting as by groups,
Here ending, there beginning, some halfway,
All sang at once, and all renewing all
In pledge and passion of the mighty song,
Their different words and clashing cadences
Wondrously merging in a sound supreme,
As if the inmost meaning of the hymn
Harmonious rolled in one unending vow
While all the singers gazed on Lincoln’s face.
Hands gripping balcony-rail, he stooped and saw
And listened motionless, with such a look
The boy upon the lamp-post clearly knew
“The heavens were opened unto him,”
“The spirit of God descending like a dove”—
Until the mystery of the general soul
Wrought to unwonted sense of unison
Moved all to silence for the homely words
Of Father Abraham Lincoln to his kind—
Words clear as Light itself, so plain—so plain
None deemed him other than their fellow man.
Once more. A boy in blue at sixteen years,
Mid groups of blue along the crazy road
Of corduroy astretch from City Point,
Toward yonder spire in fatal Petersburg,
Beyond what trenches, rifle-pits, and forts,
What woeful far-front grave-mounds sunken down
To puddles over pickets shot on post—
What cemeteries shingle-marked with names
Of companies and regiments and corps
Of mouldering bones and rags of blue and gray,
And belts and buttons, rain and wind exposed—
Mired army wagons—forms of swollen mules—
Springfields and Enfields, broken-stocked, stuck up
Or strown, all rusting—parked artillery—
Brush shelter stables—lines and lines of huts,
Tent-covered winter quarters, sticks and mud
For chimneys to the many thousand smokes
Whose dropping cinders black-rimmed million holes
Through veteran canvas ludicrously patched—
Squares of parade all mud—and mud, and mud,
With mingled grass and chips and refuse cans
Strown myriad far about the plain of war,
Whose scrub-oak roots for scanty fires were grubbed,
And one sole house, and never fence remained
Where fifty leagues of corn-land smiled before.
Belated March—a lowering, rainless day
With glints of shine; the veteran tents of Meade
Gave forth their veteran boys in crowds of blue,
Infantry, cavalry, gunners, engineers,
Easterner, Westerner, Yankee, Irish, “Dutch,”
Canuck, all sorts and sizes, frowsed, unkempt,
Unwashed, half-smoked, profane exceedingly,
Moody or jokeful, formidable, free
From fear of colonels as of corporals,
Each volunteer the child of his own whim,
And every man heart-sworn American
Trudging the mud to view the cavalcade
Of Father Abraham Lincoln to The Front.
He, Chief Commander of all Union hosts,
Of more than thrice three hundred thousand more,
Rode half a horseneck first, since Grant on right
And Meade on left kept reining back their bays;
Full uniformed were they and all their train,
Sheridan, Humphreys, Warren, Hazen, Kautz,
Barlow, McLaughlen, Ord, and thirty more,
Blazing for once in feathers and in gold.
Old Abe, all black, bestrode the famous steed,
Grant’s pacing black—and sure since war began
No host of war had such Commander seen!
Loose-reined he let the steady pacer walk;
Those rail-like legs, that forked the saddle, thrust
Prodigious spattered boots anear the mud,
Preposterous his parted coat-tails hung,
In negligence his lounging body stooped,
Tipping the antic-solemn stovepipe hat;
It seemed some old-time circuit preacher turned
From Grant to Meade and back again to Grant,
Attentive, questioning, pondering, deep concerned—
The common Civil Power directing War.
He, travesty of every point of horsemanship,
They, so bedizened, riding soldier stern—
The contrast past all telling comical—
And Father Abraham wholly unaware!
Too much by far for soldier gravity—
A breeze of laughter travelling as he passed,
Rose sudden to a gale that stormed his ear.
The President turned and gazed and understood
All in one moment, slightly shook his head,
Not warningly, but with a cheerful glee,
And sympathy and love, as if he spoke:
“You scalawags, you scamps, but have your fun!”
Pushed up the stovepipe hat, and all around
Bestowed his warming, right paternal smile,
As if his soul embraced us all at once.
Then strangely fell all laughter. Some men choked,
And some grew inarticulate with tears;
A thousand veteran children thrilled as one,
And not a man of all the throng knew why;
Some called his name, some blessed his holy heart
And then, inspired with pentecostal tongues,
We cheered so wildly for Old Father Abe
That all the bearded generals flamed in joy!
What was the miracle? His miracle.
Was Father Abraham just a son of Man,
As Jesus seemed to common Nazarenes?
Shall Father Abraham Lincoln yet prevail,
And his Republic come to stay at last?
Kind Age, unenvious Youth, democracy,
None lower than the first in comradeship,
However differing in mental force,
The higher intellect set free to Serve,
All undistracted by the woeful need
To grab or pander lest its children want;
Old trivial gewgaws of the peacock past
Smiled to the nothingness of desuetude,
With strutful Rank, with pinchbeck Pageantry,
With apish separative-cant of Class,
With inhumane conventions, all designed
To sanctify the immemorial robbery
Of Man by men; with mockful mummeries,
Called Law, to save the one perennial Wrong—
That fundamental social crime which fate
All babes alike to Inequality,
And so condemns the many million minds
(That might, with happier nurture, finely serve)
To share, through life, the harmful hates or scorns
The accursed System breeds, which still most hurts
The few who fancy it their benefit,
Shutting them lifelong from the happiness
Of such close sympathy with all their kind
As feels the universal God, or Soul,
Alive to love in every human heart.
Was it for this our Mother’s sons were slain?
Shall Father Abraham not prevail again?
We who are marching to the small-flagged graves
We earned by fight to free our fathers’ slaves,
We who by Lincoln’s hero soul were sworn,
We go more sadly toward our earthly bourne
To join our comrade host of long ago,
Since, oh so clearly, do our old hearts know
We shall not witness what we longed to see—
Our own dear children minded to be free.
Why let democracy be flouted down?
Why let your money-mongers more renown
Their golden idol than the Common Weal,
Flaunting the gains of liberty-to-steal,
Fouling the promise of the heights we trod
With Freedom’s sacrifice to Lincoln’s God?
Was it for this he wept his children slain?
Or shall our Father’s spirit rise again?
