Give us a man of God's own mold,
Born to marshal his fellow men;
One whose fame is not bought or sold
At the stroke of a politician's pen;
Give us the man of thousands ten,
Fit to do as well as to plan;
Give us a rallying-cry, and then,
Abraham Lincoln, give us a Man!
O, we will follow him to the death,
Where the foeman's fiercest columns are!
O, we will use our latest breath,
Cheering for every sacred star!
His to marshal us high and far;
Ours to battle, as patriots can
When a Hero leads the Holy War!—
Abraham Lincoln, give us a Man!
Poems like this will not die. They are a part of the deeper history of America. They are worth more than ships or guns or battlements. Only a few notes like this did Stedman strike. Once again its deep note rang in "The Hand of Lincoln":
Lo, as I gaze, that statured man,
Built up from yon large hand, appears:
A type that Nature wills to plan
But once in all a people's years.
What better than this voiceless cast
To tell of such a one as he,
Since through its living semblance passed
The thought that bade a race be free!
Another deep note he struck in that war period that so shook him, a note called forth by personal bereavement and put into immortal form in "The Undiscovered Country," a song that was to be sung at the funerals of his wife and his sons, and later at his own:
Could we but know
The land that ends our dark, uncertain travel,
Where lie those happier hills and meadows low—
Ah, if beyond the spirit's inmost cavil,
Aught of that Country could we surely know,
Who would not go?
Aside from a handful of spontaneous love songs—"At Twilight," "Autumn Song," "Stanzas for Music," "Song from a Drama," "Creole Love Song"—nothing else of Stedman's poetic work greatly matters. He is a lyrist who struck a few true notes, a half dozen perhaps—thin indeed in volume, but those few immortal.
As the new period progressed, the period in America that had awakened to the full realization that "a new land needs new song," he became gradually silent as a singer and gave himself more and more to prose criticism, a work for which nature had peculiarly endowed him.