William Knox was born at Firth, in the parish of Lilliesleaf, in the county of Roxburghshire, on the 17th of August, 1789. From his early youth he composed verses. He merited the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who afforded him pecuniary assistance. He died November 12, 1825, at the age of thirty-six.
| Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-flitting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, The flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, He passes from life to his rest in the grave. The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade, Be scattered around and together be laid; And the young and the old, and the low and the high Shall molder to dust and together shall lie. [top] The infant a mother attended and loved, The mother that infant's affection who proved, The husband that mother and infant who blest, Each, all, are away to their dwellings of rest. The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose eye, Shone beauty and pleasure, her triumphs are by; And the mem'ry of those who loved her and praised Are alike from the minds of the living erased. The hand of the king that the scepter hath borne, The brow of the priest that the miter hath worn, The eye of the sage and the heart of the brave Are hidden and lost in the depths of the grave. The peasant whose lot was to sow and to reap, The herdsman who climbed with his goats up the steep, The beggar who wandered in search of his bread, Have faded away like the grass that we tread. The saint who enjoyed the communion of heaven, The sinner who dared to remain unforgiven, The wise and the foolish, the guilty and just, Have quietly mingled their bones in the dust. So the multitude goes like the flower or the weed That withers away to let others succeed, So the multitude comes, even those we behold, To repeat every tale that has often been told. For we are the same that our fathers have been; We see the same sights our fathers have seen; We drink the same streams, and view the same sun, And run the same course our fathers have run. The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think, From the death we are shrinking our fathers would shrink; To the life we are clinging they also would cling, But it speeds from us all like a bird on the wing. They loved, but the story we cannot unfold; They scorned, but the heart of the haughty is cold; They grieved, but no wail from their slumber will come; They joyed, but the tongue of their gladness is dumb. They died, ay, they died. We things that are now, That walk on the turf that lies over their brow, And make in their dwellings a transient abode, Meet the things that they met on their pilgrimage road. Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain, Are mingled together in sunshine and rain: And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, Still follow each other like surge upon surge. [top] 'Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath, From the blossom of health to the paleness of death, From the gilded salon to the bier and the shroud,— Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? |
"The Last Leaf," by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was also a favorite poem of Lincoln, says Henry C. Whitney, his friend and biographer (in his "Life of Lincoln," Vol. I, page 238):
"Over and over again I have heard him repeat:
| The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom; And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb. |
and tears would come unbidden to his eyes, probably at thought of the grave (his mother's) at Gentryville, or that in the bend of the Sangamo" (of Ann Rutledge, his first love, who died shortly before the time set for their wedding, and whose memory Lincoln ever kept sacred).
While Lincoln, so far as can be ascertained, wrote nothing in verse after 1846, he developed in his speeches a literary style which is poetical in the highest sense of that term. More than all American statesmen his utterances and writings possess that classic quality whose supreme expression is found in Greek literature. This is because Lincoln had an essentially Hellenic mind. First of all the architecture of his thought was that of the Greek masters, who, whether as Phidias they built the Parthenon to crown with harmonious beauty the Acropolis, or as Homer they recorded in swelling narrative from its dramatic beginning the strife of the Achaeans before Troy, or even as Euclid, they developed from postulates the relations of space, had a deep insight into the order in which mother nature was striving to express herself, and a reverent impulse to aid her in bodying forth according to her methods the ideal forms of the cosmos, the world of beauty, no less within the soul of man than without it, which was intended by such help to be realized as a whole in the infinity of time, and in part in the vision [top] of every true workman. In short, Lincoln had a profound sense of the fitness of things, that which Aristotle, the scientific analyst of human thought and the philosopher of its proper expression, called "poetic justice." He strove to make his reasoning processes strictly logical, and to this end carried with him as he rode the legal circuit not law-books, but a copy of Euclid's geometry, and passed his time on the way demonstrating to his drivers the theorems therein proposed. "Demonstrate" he said he considered to be the greatest word in the English language. He constructed every one of his later speeches on the plan of a Euclidean solution. His Cooper Union speech on "Slavery as the Fathers Viewed It," which contributed so largely to his Presidential nomination, was such a demonstration, settling what was thereafter never attempted to be controverted: his contention that the makers of the Constitution merely tolerated property in human flesh and blood as a primitive and passing phase of civilization, and never intended that it should be perpetuated by the charter of the Republic.
So, too, the Gettysburg speech, brief as it is, is the statement of a thesis, the principles upon which the Fathers founded the nation, and of the heroic demonstration of the same by the soldiers fallen on the field, and the addition of a moral corollary of this, the high resolve of the living to prosecute the work until the vision of the Fathers was realized.
In substance of thought and in form of its presentation the speech is as perfect a poem as ever was written, and even in the minor qualities of artistic language—rhythm and cadence, phonetic euphony, rhetorical symbolism, and that subtle reminiscence of a great literary and spiritual inheritance, the Bible, which stands to us as Homer did to the ancients—it excels the finest gem to be found in poetic cabinets from the Greek Anthology downward. Only because it was not written in the typography of verse, with capitalized and paragraphed initial words at the beginning of each thought-group of words, has it failed of recognition as a poem by academic minds. Had Walt Whitman composed the address, and printed it in the above manner, it would now appear in every anthology of poetry published [top] since its date. To convince of this those conventional people who must have an ocular demonstration of form in order to compare the address with accepted examples of poetry, I will dare to incur the condemnation of those who rightly look upon such a departure from Lincoln's own manner of writing the speech as profanation, and present it in the shape of vers libre. For the latter class of readers this, the greatest poem by Lincoln, the greatest, indeed, yet produced in America, may be preferably read in the original form on [page 100] of this collection. I trust that these, especially if they are teachers of literature, will pardon, for the sake of others less cultivated in poetic taste, what may appear a duplication here, unnecessary to themselves, of the address.