WHEN iron taskwork levelled low
My youthful dreams of pride,
’T was “Oh to reach the end and go
Beyond all seas,” I sighed;
“For freedom’s songbirds pierce me sore,

I wince when lovers greet,
All blessed lives mock mine the more
In this long World’s strange street.”

Time wrought that envy to an end,
I could endure the day,

The looming sea I took for friend,
Its patient, solemn sway
Taught me acceptance of control,
Contempt for woe and joy,
And Life a dream wherein what soul

Scorns Fate, escapes annoy.

With this stern wisdom once acquaint
My spirit coldly braved,
It gave no thanks, it made no plaint,
Suffered, and nowise craved;

Thy life, O heart, seemed calmly dead,
Thy dirge the friendly Main,
Thy tomb and empty blueness spread
To dome a senseless plain.

At last, with one transfiguring sign

(Love wrought this wonder rare),
Lord God, what anthems intertwine
To thrill Thy shining air!
Our choral gladness wings above
The far resurging sea,

Whose diapason chants the Love
That wakes my soul to Thee.

“SPIRIT,” said God, “come up for Judgment now.”
The words seemed spoke in such familiar tone
As if the accents of a natural voice
Close to the heart as its own beating pulse.

“Come up,” it said, “for final judgment now

Before the absolute court of Me in Thee,
The court which hears no plea, allows no charge,
Abates no jot in estimating wrong,
Awards no punishment and grants no boon,
But weighs precise the actual quality

Of Spirit proven by the appointed tests,
And true decides if it recruit in Me
The Immortal Strength, or if the tempted one,
Too weak for toils eternal, sanely pass
To that which I am not, Oblivion.”


Then Thee reviewed with Me, O God, the course,—
What bodily appetites indulged or quelled;
What hates and harms repaid with hurts and scorns,
Or with forgetfulness or benefits;
The proper rest that merged to slothful ease,

Or was in pain enduringly ignored;
That laughing, wholesome impulse which, unchecked,
Became derision’s cruelty of glee;
The righteous anger rushing headlong on,
What did, when calmly visioned, piteous seem;

That pity for the Weak, which blamed alike
The unjust heedless and the heedful Strong;
The passionate heart’s excess in everything,
Its wild unsteadiness unto the Soul
Which yet persisted, sternly right, to chide

The insensate rebel part averse from Thee.

The Thee and Me, O God, revised it all
Clearly, relentlessly, and grave declared,—
“Thou didst not ever fail the Heart, O Soul,
Nor doth it fail thee now. Nay, We elect

No Lethe, no Oblivion, but the strife
Eternal, toward we know not what, save Good.”

Then some calm happiness known not before
Came to the Life whose Judgement hour was o’er.

MY friend conceived the soul hereafter dwells
In any heaven the inmost heart desires,
The heart, which craves delight, at pain rebels,
And balks, or obeys the soul till life expires.

He deemed that all the eternal Force contrives


Is wrought to revigorate its own control,
And that its alchemy some strength derives
From every tested and unflagging soul.

He deemed a spirit which avails to guide
A human heart, gives proof of energy

To be received in That which never bides,
But ever toils for what can never be—

A perfect All—toward which the Eternal strives
To urge forever every atom’s range,
The Ideal, which never unto Form arrives,

Because new concept emanates from change.

He deemed the inmost heart is what aligns
Man’s aspiration, noble or impure,
And that immortal Tolerance assigns
Each soul what Aspiration would secure.


And if it choose what highest souls would rue—
Some endless round of mortal joys inane—
Such fate befits what souls could not subdue
The heart’s poor shrinking from the chrism of pain.


My friend reviewed, nigh death, how staunch the soul


Had waged in him a conflict, never done,
To rule the dual self that fought control,
Spirit and flesh inextricably one.

His passionless judgment pondered well the past,
Patient, relentless, ere he spoke sincere,—

“Through all the strife my soul prevailed at last,
It rules my inmost heart’s desire here;

“My Will craves not some paradise of zest
Where mortal joys eternally renew,
Nor blank nirvana, nor elysian rest,

Nor palaced pomp to bombast fancy true;

“It yearns no whit to swell some choiring strain
In endless amplitudes of useless praise;
It dares to aspire to share the immortal pain
Of toil in mouldering Form from phase to phase.


“To me, of old, such fate some terror bore,
But now great gladness in my spirit glows,
While death clings round me friendlier than before,
To loose the soul that mounts beyond repose.”


Yet, at the end, from seeming death he stirred

As one whose sleep is broke by sudden shine,
And whispered Christ, as if the soul had heard
Tidings of some exceeding sweet design.

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?