hat 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 to-day 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 astounded 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,--
The roof-tree fallen,--all
That could affright, appall!

Such thunderbolts, in other lands,
Have smitten the rod from royal hands,
But spared, with us, till now,
Each laurelled Cesar's brow!

No Cesar he, whom we lament,
A Man without a precedent,
Sent, it would see, to do
His work--and perish too!

Not by the weary cares of State,
The endless tasks, which will not wait,
Which, often done in vain,
Must yet be done again:

Not in the dark, wild tide of War,
Which rose so high, and rolled so far,
Sweeping from sea to sea
In awful anarchy:--

Four fateful years of mortal strife,
Which slowly drained the Nation's life,
(Yet, for each drop that ran
There sprang an armed man!)

Not then;--but when by measures meet,--
By victory, and by defeat,--
By courage, patience, skill,
The People's fixed _"We will!"_

Had pierced, had crushed Rebellion dead,--
Without a Hand, without a Head:--
At last, when all was well,
He fell--O, _how_ he fell!

The time,--the place,--the stealing Shape,--
The coward shot,--the swift escape,--
The wife--the widow's scream,--
It is a hideous Dream!

A Dream?--what means this pageant, then?
These multitudes of solemn men,
Who speak not when they meet,
But throng the silent street?

The flags half-mast, that late so high
Flaunted at each new victory?
(The stars no brightness shed,
But bloody looks the red!)

The black festoons that stretch for miles,
And turn the streets to funeral aisles?
(No house too poor to show
The Nation's badge of woe!)

The cannon's sudden, sullen boom,--
The bells that toll of death a