STATUE OF LINCOLN
By Leonard W. Volk
Richard Henry Stoddard, born in Hingham, Massachusetts, July 2, 1825. His first book, entitled Foot Prints, was published in 1849, and some three years after a more mature collection of poems was published. In later years a number of his books were published, all of which have been received with approbation by the public. Died May 12, 1903.
[AN HORATIAN ODE]
(To Lincoln)
| 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 today 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! [top] 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 laureled Caesar's brow. No Caesar he, whom we lament, A man without a precedent, Sent it would seem, to do His work—and perish too! Not by the weary cares of state, The endless tasks, which will not wait, Which, often done in vain, Must yet be done again; Not in the dark, wild tide of war, Which rose so high, and rolled so far, Sweeping from sea to sea In awful anarchy;— Four fateful years of mortal strife, Which slowly drained the Nation's life, (Yet, for each drop that ran There sprang an armed man!) [top] Not then;—but when by measures meet— By victory, and by defeat, By courage, patience, skill, The people's fixed "We will!" Had pierced, had crushed rebellion dead— Without a hand, without a head:— At last, when all was well, He fell—O, how he fell! 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 today, No tyrant was; so mild a sway In one such weight who bore Was never known before! |
| From "Poems of Richard Henry Stoddard" Copyright, 1880, by Charles Scribner's Sons. |