For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head; It is some dream that on the deck You 've fallen cold and dead. My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will: The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; From fearful trip the victor ship, comes in with object won: Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! But I, with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. WALT WHITMAN. April 15, 1865. ABRAHAM LINCOLN. This is a fragment of the noble Commemoration Ode delivered at Harvard College to the memory of those of its students who fell in the war which kept the country whole. UCH was he, our Martyr-Chief, With ashes on her head, Wept with the passion of an angry grief: To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote: For him her Old World moulds aside she threw, Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; But by his clear-grained human worth, They knew that outward grace is dust; In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill, That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, I praise him not; it were too late; And some innative weakness there must be Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait, Safe in himself as in a fate. So always firmly he: He knew to bide his time, And can his fame abide, Still patient in his simple faith sublime, Great captains, with their guns and drums, But at last silence comes; These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame, |