The black festoons that stretch for miles,
And turn the streets to funeral aisles?
(No house too poor to show
The nation's badge of woe.)
The cannon's sudden, sullen boom,
The bells that toll of death and doom,
The rolling of the drums,
The dreadful car that comes?
Cursed be the hand that fired the shot,
The frenzied brain that hatched the plot,
Thy country's Father slain
By thee, thou worse than Cain!
Tyrants have fallen by such as thou,
And good hath followed—may it now!
(God lets bad instruments
Produce the best events.)
But he, the man we mourn to-day,
No tyrant was: so mild a sway
In one such weight who bore
Was never known before.
Cool should he be, of balanced powers,
The ruler of a race like ours,
Impatient, headstrong, wild,
The Man to guide the Child.
And this he was, who most unfit
(So hard the sense of God to hit)
Did seem to fill his place;
With such a homely face,
Such rustic manners, speech uncouth
(That somehow blundered out the truth),
Untried, untrained to bear
The more than kingly care.
Ah! And his genius put to scorn
The proudest in the purple born,
Whose wisdom never grew
To what, untaught, he knew,
The People, of whom he was one:
No gentleman, like Washington
(Whose bones, methinks, make room,
To have him in their tomb!).