"'The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think;
From the death we are shrinking our fathers would shrink;
To the life we are clinging they also would cling;
But it speeds from us all like a bird on the wing.
"'They loved, but the story we can not unfold;
They scorned, but the heart of the haughty is cold;
They grieved, but no wail from their slumber will come;
They joyed, but the tongue of their gladness is dumb.
"'They died, ay, they died: we things that are now,
That walk on the turf that lies over their brow,
And make in their dwellings a transient abode,
Meet the things that they met on their pilgrimage road.
"'Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,
Are mingled together in sunshine and rain;
And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge,
Still follow each other like surge upon surge.
"''Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath,
From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,
From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud—
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?'"
He stood there in moody silence when he had finished the recitation, which was (unknown to him) from the pen of a pastoral Scotch poet. The Tunker looked at him, and saw how deep were his feelings, and how earnest were his desires to know the true way of life and to do well his mission, and go on with the great multitude, whose procession comes upon the earth and vanishes from the scenes. But he did not dream of the greatness of the destiny for which that student was preparing in the hard college of the woods.
"My education must always be defective," said the young student. "I can not read law in great law-offices, like other young men, but I can be just—I can do right; and I would never undertake a case of law, for any money, that I did not think right and just. I would stand for what I thought was right, as I did by the old Indian, and I think that the people in time would learn to trust me."
"Abraham Lincoln, to school one's conscience to the habit of right, so that it can not do wrong, is the first and the highest education. It is what one is that makes him a knight, and that is the only true knighthood. The highest education is that of the soul. Did you know that the Indian whom you saved was Main-Pogue?"
"Yes."
"And that Main-Pogue is the uncle and foster-father of my old guide, Waubeno?"