an. He knew no fear except the fear of doing wrong. Hating
slavery, pitying the master--seeking to conquer, not persons, but
prejudices--he was the embodiment of the self-denial, the courage, the
hope, and the nobility of a nation. He spoke, not to inflame, not to
upbraid, but to convince. He raised his hands, not to strike, but in
benediction. He longed to pardon. He loved to see the pearls of joy on
the cheeks of a wife whose husband he had rescued from death.

Lincoln was the grandest figure of the fiercest civil war. He is the
gentlest memory of our world.

[Transcriber's Note: Part of this was omitted in original.]

[28] _By permission of Mr. C. P. Farrell._

LINCOLN[29]

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

Hurt was the Nation with a mighty wound,
And all her ways were filled with clam'rous sound,
Wailed loud the South with unremitting grief,
And wept the North that could not find relief.
Then madness joined its harshest tone to strife:
A minor note swelled in the song of life
Till, stirring with the love that filled his breast,
But still, unflinching at the Right's behest
Grave Lincoln came, strong-handed, from afar,--
The mighty Homer of the lyre of war!
'Twas he who bade the raging tempest cease,
Wrenched from his strings the harmony of peace,
Muted the strings that made the discord,--Wrong,
And gave his spirit up in thund'rous song.
Oh, mighty Master of the mighty lyre!
Earth heard and trembled at thy strains of fire:
Earth learned of thee what Heav'n already knew,
And wrote thee down among her treasured few!

[29] _By permission of Mrs. Mathilde Dunbar._

THE GRANDEST FIGURE[30]

BY WALT WHITMAN

Glad am I to give even the most brief and shorn testimony in memory of
Abraham Lincoln. Everything I heard about him authentically, and every
time I saw him (and it was my fortune through 1862 to '65 to see, or
pass a word with, or watch him, personally, perhaps twenty or thirty
times), added to and annealed my respect and love at the passing
moment. And as I dwell on what I myself heard or saw of the mighty
Westerner, and blend it with the history and literature of my age, and
conclude it with his death, it seems like some tragic play, superior
to all else I know--vaster and fierier and more convulsionary, for
this America of ours, than Eschylus or Shakespeare ever drew for
Athens or for England. And then the Moral permeating, underlying a