BY RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
Not as when some great captain falls
In battle, where his country calls,
Beyond the struggling lines
That push his dread designs
To doom, by some stray ball struck dead:
Or in the last charge, at the head
Of his determined men,
Who must be victors then!
Nor as when sink the civic great,
The safer pillars of the State,
Whose calm, mature, wise words
Suppress the need of swords!—
With no such tears as e'er were shed
Above the noblest of our dead
Do we to-day deplore
The man that is no more!
Our sorrow hath a wider scope,
Too strange for fear, too vast for hope,—
A wonder, blind and dumb,
That waits—what is to come!
Not more astonished had we been
If madness, that dark night, unseen,
Had in our chambers crept,
And murdered while we slept!
We woke to find a mourning earth—
Our Lares shivered on the hearth,—
To roof-tree fallen,—all
That could affright, appall!
Such thunderbolts, in other lands,
Have smitten the rod from royal hands,
But spared, with us, till now,
Each laurelled Cæsar's brow!
No Cæsar he, whom we lament,
A man without a precedent,
Sent it would seem, to do
His work—and perish too!