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 salon to the bier and the shroud,--
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

"The Last Leaf," by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was also a favorite poem of
Lincoln, says Henry C. Whitney, his friend and biographer (in his
"Life of Lincoln," Vol. I, page 238):

"Over and over again I have heard him repeat:

The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.

and tears would come unbidden to his eyes, probably at thought of the
grave (his mother's) at Gentryville, or that in the bend of the
Sangamo" (of Ann Rutledge, his first love, who died shortly before the
time set for their wedding, and whose memory Lincoln ever kept
sacred).

While Lincoln, so far as can be ascertained, wrote nothing in verse
after 1846, he developed in his speeches a literary style which is
poetical in the highest sense of that term. More than all American
statesmen his utterances and writings possess that classic quality
whose supreme expression is found in Greek literature. This is because
Lincoln had an essentially Hellenic mind. First of all the
architecture of his thought was that of the Greek masters, who,
whether as Phidias they built the Parthenon to crown with harmonious
beauty the Acropolis, or as Homer they recorded in swelling narrative
from its dramatic beginning the strife of the Achaeans before Troy, or
even as Euclid, they developed from postulates the relations of space,
had a deep insight into the order in which mother nature was striving
to express herself, and a reverent impulse to aid her in bodying forth
according to her methods the ideal forms of the cosmos, the world of
beauty, no less within the soul of man than without it, which was
intended by such help to be realized as a whole in the infinity of
time, and in part in the vision of every true workman. In short,
Lincoln had a profound sense of the fitness of things, that which
Aristotle, the scientific analyst of human thought and the philosopher
of its proper expression, called "poetic justice." He strove to make
his reasoning processes