uns and drums,
Disturb our judgment for the hour,
But at last silence comes;
These are all gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.

[Illustration: STATUE OF LINCOLN

By Leonard W. Volk]

Richard Henry Stoddard, born in Hingham, Massachusetts, July 2, 1825.
His first book, entitled _Foot Prints_, was published in 1849, and
some three years after a more mature collection of poems was
published. In later years a number of his books were published, all of
which have been received with approbation by the public. Died May 12,
1903.

AN HORATIAN ODE

(_To Lincoln_)

Not as when some great captain falls
In battle, where his country calls,
Beyond the struggling lines
That push his dread designs

To doom, by some stray ball struck dead:
Or in the last charge, at the head
Of his determined men,
Who must be victors then!

Nor as when sink the civic great,
The safer pillars of the State,
Whose calm, mature, wise words
Suppress the need of swords!

With no such tears as e'er were shed
Above the noblest of our dead
Do we today deplore
The man that is no more.

Our sorrow hath a wider scope,
Too strange for fear, too vast for hope,--
A wonder, blind and dumb,
That waits--what is to come!

Not more astonished had we been
If madness, that dark night, unseen,
Had in our chambers crept,
And murdered while we slept!

We woke to find a mourning earth--
Our Lares shivered on the hearth,--
To roof-tree fallen--all
That could affright, appall!

Such thunderbolts, in other lands,
Have smitten the rod from royal hands,