The big, black casket was the period at the end of an era. The marble effigies of the great men about it, the canvases on which the features of statesmen and soldiers lived in oil, were but the mute testimonies to a condition which had passed. The pale form, lying in state between moving lines of those who had loved him, was all that earth had left of the man who gathered together the possibilities of the past—who could express the spirit, the effectiveness and the hope of the future.
There was the statue of George Washington, twice a President, once maligned, now half deified. There was John Marshall, once Chief Justice of the United States; once a patriot soldier at Valley Forge; once presiding at the trial of Aaron Burr—whose hand had been raised in a bolder assault; but always the champion of law, the lover of order, the son of republican independence. There hung the portrait of Captain Lawrence—and his dying words carried new courage to the hearts of the mourners: “Don’t Give Up the Ship!”
There was Madison, whose seat of government had been driven from the capital when the British assailed the nation in the war of 1812; the man who had watched from the hills to the north the smoke that rose from the burning buildings of the nation.
All the history of the past was bound up in the pictured forms and the marble allegories of that rotunda. And over it all lifted the painted interior of the dome, the apotheosis of that first President, who had been first in war, and first in peace, but who now made room for another beside him in the hearts of his countrymen.
All they had promised, all the nation of the past had hoped for and striven for had been expressed in the administration, had been made possible by the wise statesmanship of this hero who lay still and silent in death below them. And it seemed to the crowds that bent with bared heads as they passed by the coffin that the very death of this great man had made more secure the destiny of the nation.
Outside the storm raged more fiercely, and the people clamored against the savagery of an unguided crowd. Outside the winds were voicing their own requiem, and wailing at the feet of that symbol of liberty which crowns the highest height of the colossal building. And here in the darkened rotunda, where state occasions had signalized the progress of a people from weakness unto strength, from experiment to established systems—forty thousand people—delegates from eighty million of their fellows, touched with reverent fingers the trappings of the dead and moved on to mingle again with the world. While he had lain sick in that fair house of his friend at Buffalo, it had seemed to these thousands that the one voice of the Republic must be:
“Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.”
Yet as they gazed at the pensive face, as they looked into the countenance which had never feared, had never found a duty too difficult for performing, they added the lines—
“Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o’er our fears,