The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States / Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.

by John Clark Ridpath

The ebb and flow of hope, the blinding rain

Of bitter tears that came and came again,—

All, all are ended! O’er the sighing deep

Floats on the solemn air a sad, low strain,

A mournful dirge that seems to sob and weep!

O Nation, take your dead and lay him down to sleep!

The President was dead. The curtain had fallen at last between an anxious people and the first citizen of the Republic. It only remained for fifty millions of freemen to take him up with tender hands and bear him away to the narrow house prepared for all living. It was a sad duty which the Nation was not likely to neglect or leave to others to perform.

In the preparations made for the President’s funeral there was neither passion nor excitement. When Cæsar fell there was an uproar. The benches of the Senate House were torn up by the maddened populace to make a pyre for the burning of the dead Imperator’s body. We have improved upon all that. The temperate spirit and self-restraint of the American people promise well for the perpetuity of the Republic. However much cause there may be for anger and alarm, it is not likely that our institutions will ever be endangered by an outburst of popular fury.

The shutters of Francklyn cottage were closed. The sun’s face wore a coppery tint as he came up from the sea to look on the scene of death. The wind, which had blown stormily for a week, fell to a calm. A September haze filled the air and sky, and an indescribable quiet settled over the long, low shores of Jersey. With the rising of the sun a single craft far out at sea, floating, as it seemed, on nothing, broke the line of the horizon.

At the cottage the silence of death prevailed. At a little distance, on all sides, armed sentinels, with fixed bayonets, paced their beats, guardians of the border line between now and hereafter, beyond which the living might not pass. The flag, which, since the arrival of the President at Elberon, had been floating from a pole thrust out of an upper window of the cottage, was draped with black; but beyond this somber signal no outward sign of mourning was apparent. The first comers were the journalists; but in their demeanor the customary eagerness of competition was no longer apparent. Fifty millions of people would, before night, read the truths which these reporters had come to gather, but their subject of inquiry was now death rather than life; and their demeanor was calm and respectful in that shadowy presence.