"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.
"'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 saloon to the bier and the shroud,—
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"
These curiously sad lines were chosen by Mr. Lincoln when he was a very young man to commemorate a grief which lay with continual heaviness on his heart, but to which he could not otherwise allude,—the death of Ann Rutledge, in whose grave Mr. Lincoln said that his heart lay buried. He muttered these verses as he rambled through the woods; he was heard to murmur them as he slipped into the village at nightfall; they came unbidden to his lips in all places, and very often in his later life. In the year of his nomination, he repeated them to some friends. When he had finished them, he said "they sounded to him as much like true poetry as anything that he had ever heard." The poem is now his; it is imperishably associated with his memory and interwoven with the history of his greatest sorrow. Mr. Lincoln's adoption of it has saved it from oblivion, and translated it from the "poet's corner" of the country newspaper to a place in the story of his own life.
But enough has been given to show that Mr. Lincoln was as incapable of insulting the dead, in the manner credited to him in the Antietam episode, as he was of committing mean and unmanly outrages upon the living. If hypercritical and self-appointed judges are still disposed to award blame for anything that happened on that occasion, let their censure fall upon me, and not upon the memory of the illustrious dead, who was guiltless of wrong and without the shadow of blame for the part he bore in that misjudged affair. My own part in the incident, in the light of the facts here given, needs no apology.