Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote for the funeral services at Concord, Massachusetts, a poem of which the following is the last stanza:
“Great captains, with their guns and drums,
Disturb our judgment for the hour,
But at last, silence comes;
These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.”