n."

Perhaps the most noteworthy of Whitman's war poems is the one called "When
Lilacs last in the Door-yard bloomed," written in commemoration of
President Lincoln.

The main effect of this poem is of strong, solemn, and varied music; and
it involves in its construction a principle after which perhaps the great
composers most work,--namely, spiritual auricular analogy. At first it
would seem to defy analysis, so rapt is it, and so indirect. No reference
whatever is made to the mere fact of Lincoln's death; the poet does not
even dwell upon its unprovoked atrocity, and only occasionally is the tone
that of lamentation; but, with the intuitions of the grand art, which is
the most complex when it seems most simple, he seizes upon three beautiful
facts of nature, which he weaves into a wreath for the dead President's
tomb. The central thought is of death, but around this he curiously
twines, first, the early-blooming lilacs which the poet may have plucked
the day the dark shadow came; next the song of the hermit thrush, the most
sweet and solemn of all our songsters, heard at twilight in the dusky
cedars; and with these the evening star, which, as many may remember,
night after night in the early part of that eventful spring, hung low in
the west with unusual and tender brightness. These are the premises whence
he starts his solemn chant.

The attitude, therefore, is not that of being bowed down and weeping
hopeless tears, but of singing a commemorative hymn, in which the voices
of nature join, and fits that exalted condition of the soul which serious
events and the presence of death induce. There are no words of mere
eulogy, no statistics, and no story or narrative; but there are pictures,
processions, and a strange mingling of darkness and light, of grief and
triumph: now the voice of the bird, or the drooping lustrous star, or the
sombre thought of death; then a recurrence to the open scenery of the land
as it lay in the April light, "the summer approaching with richness and
the fields all busy with labor," presently dashed in upon by a spectral
vision of armies with torn and bloody battle-flags, and, again, of the
white skeletons of young men long afterward strewing the ground. Hence the
piece has little or nothing of the character of the usual productions on
such occasions. It is dramatic; yet there is no development of plot, but
a constant interplay, a turning and returning of images and sentiments.

The poet br