Lincoln Day Entertainments. Various

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       Martyr beloved, on whom, when life was done,

       Fame looked, and saw another Washington!

      ON THE LIFE-MASK OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

      Richard Watson Gilder

      THIS bronze doth keep the very form and mold

       Of our great martyr's face. Yes, this is he:

       That brow all wisdom, all benignity;

       That human humorous mouth; those cheeks that hold

       Like some harsh landscape all the summer's gold;

       That spirit fit for sorrow, as the sea

       For storms to beat on; the lone agony

       Those silent, patient lips too well foretold.

       Yes, this is he who ruled a world of men

       As might some prophet of the elder day—

       Brooding above the tempest and the fray

       With deep-eyed thought and more than mortal ken.

       A power was his beyond the touch of art

       Or armed strength—his pure and mighty heart.

      ABRAHAM LINCOLN

      James Russell Lowell

      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.

      SUCH was he, our Martyr-Chief,

       Whom late the Nation he had led,

       With ashes on her head,

       Wept with the passion of an angry grief:

       Forgive me, if from present things I turn

       To speak what in my heart will beat and burn,

       And hang my wreath on this world-honored urn.

       Nature, they say, doth dote,

       And cannot make a man

       Save on some worn-out plan,

       Repeating us by rote:

       For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,

       And, choosing sweet clay from the breast

       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;

       One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,

       Not lured by any cheat of birth,

       But by his clear-grained human worth,

       And brave old wisdom of sincerity!

       They knew that outward grace is dust;

       They could not choose but trust

       In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill,

       And supple-tempered will

       That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.

       His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,

       Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,

       A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;

       Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,

       Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,

       Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.