lit I
 
 LINCOLN ROOM 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
 MEMORIAL 
 
 the Class of 1901 
 
 founded by 
 
 HARLAN HOYT HORNER 
 
 and 
 
 HENRIETTA CALHOUN HORNER
 
 BY "PERCY MACKAYE 
 
 The Ca.nterbury Pilgrims* c4 Comedy 
 
 Fenris, the Wolf, A Tra.gedy 
 
 Jeanne T>'Arc 
 
 Sappho and Phaon 
 
 The Scarecro<w, A Tragedy of the Ludicrous 
 
 Mater, An American Study in Comedy 
 
 Uniform 12mo. $1.25 net, each 
 
 Lincoln: Centenary Ode
 
 CENTENARY ODE
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 ODE ON THE CENTENARY 
 OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 BY 
 PERCY MACKAYE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1909 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Copyright, 1909, 
 
 By The Macmillan Company. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. 
 Published February, 7909. 
 
 J. S. Cushing Co Berwick & Smith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 Hoi /H i^ a 
 
 Yet may ive strt've to trace 
 
 His shado^w — <where it pulses 'vast 
 
 Upon imagination, cast 
 
 By the oft-handtrimm^d lamp of history — 
 
 In carded breath, or bronze, that ive may scan 
 ^ The imagined child and man 
 
 ^ Whose life and death are looms of our o^n destiny^
 
 Delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences 
 
 at the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York 
 
 February, 1909
 
 I 
 
 TT was the season bleak 
 
 Of silence and long night, 
 And solemn starshine and large solitude ; 
 Hardly more husht the world when first the word 
 Of God creation stirred, 
 
 Far steept in wilderness. By the frore creek. 
 Mute in the moon, the sculptured stag in flight 
 Paused, panting silver ; in her cedarn lair,
 
 Crouched with her starveling litter, the numb lynx 
 
 Winked the keen hoar-frost, quiet as a sphinx ; 
 
 On the lone forest trail 
 
 Only the coyote's wail 
 
 Quivered, and ceased. 
 
 It was the chrisom rude 
 
 Of winter and wild beast 
 
 That consecrated, by harsh nature's rite, 
 
 A meagre cabin crude, 
 
 Builded of logs and bark, 
 
 To be a pilgrim nation's hallow'd ark 
 
 And shrine the goal aspiring ages seek.
 
 No ceremonial 
 
 Of pealed chime was there, or blared horn, 
 
 Such as hath blazoned births of lesser kings, 
 
 When he — the elder brother of us all, 
 
 Lincoln — was bom. 
 
 At his nativity 
 
 Want stood as sponsor, stark Obscurity 
 
 Was midwife, and all lonely things 
 
 Of nature were unconscious ministers 
 
 To endow his spirit meek 
 
 With their own melancholy. So when he — 
 
 An infant king of commoners — 
 
 [13]
 
 Lay in his mother's arms, of all the earth 
 
 [Which now his fame wears for a diadem] 
 
 None heeded of his birth ; 
 
 Only a star burned over Bethlehem 
 
 More bright, and, big with prophecy, 
 
 A secret gust from that far February 
 
 Fills now the organ-reeds that peal his centenary. 
 
 [H]
 
 II 
 
 ^It 7HO shall distil in song those epic years? 
 
 Only the Sibyl of simplicity, 
 Touched by the light and dew of common tears, 
 Might chant that homely native Odyssea. 
 
 For there are lives too large in simple truth 
 For art to limn or elegy to gauge, 
 And there are men so near to God's own ruth 
 They are the better angels of their age.
 
 And such was he : beyond the pale of song 
 His grandeur looms in truth, with awful grace ; 
 He lives where beauty's origins belong 
 Deep in the primal raptures of his race. 
 
 Yet may we strive to trace 
 
 His shadow — where it pulses vast 
 
 Upon imagination, cast 
 
 By the oft-handtrimm'd lamp of history — 
 
 In carved breath, or bronze, that we may scan 
 
 The imagined child and man 
 
 Whose life and death are looms of our own destiny. 
 
 [i6]
 
 Ill 
 
 ^ I ^HE loveliness which is reality 
 
 Surrounds us, but its glamourous romance 
 We glean afar from heroes of old France, 
 Or Hellas' arms, or Gothic heraldry, 
 While Roland and his conquerors 
 With Sigmund sleep beside our doors, 
 And Homer's age awaits us at our hearth. 
 
 How like a saga of the northern sea 
 Our own Kentucky hero-tale begins! 
 
 ['7]
 
 Once on a time, far in a wintry wood, 
 
 A lone hut stood ; 
 
 There lived a poor man*s son, that was to be 
 
 A master man of earth. 
 And so for us. 
 
 Like children in the great hall of his spirit. 
 The homebred fairy-story spins 
 Annals whose grace the after-times inherit. 
 
 The uncouth homestead by the trail of Boone, 
 The untitled grant, the needy exodus. 
 The ox-cart on the Indiana heath, 
 
 [i8]
 
 The log shack by the Sangamon, and soon 
 The fever'd mother and the forest death — 
 From these the lonely epic wanders on. 
 
 The longshank boy, with visage creased by toil 
 And laughter of the soil, 
 Cribbing his book of statutes from his chore, 
 Erelong his nooning fellows of the field 
 Hail their scrub-orator, or at sundown — 
 Slouching his gaunt and sallow six-foot-four — 
 Their native Touchstone of the village store. 
 Or from the turf, where he has matched his build
 
 To throw the county champion in the loam, 
 
 Idly he saunters home 
 
 To rock some mother's cradle in the town ; 
 
 Or, stretched on counter calico, with Clay 
 
 And organ-sounding Webster, dream the night away. 
 
 But time begins 
 
 Slowly to sift the substance from the slag. 
 
 And now along the county pike's last lap, 
 
 With giant shins 
 
 Shut knifewise in his wabbling rattletrap, 
 
 The circuit lawyer trots his tired nag 
 
 [20]
 
 Toward the noon tavern, reins up, and unrolls 
 
 His awkward length of wrinkled bombazine, 
 
 Clutching his tattered green 
 
 Umbrella and thin carpetsack, 
 
 And flings a joke that makes the rafters roar : 
 
 As if, uplooming from of yore. 
 
 Some quaint-accoutred king of trolls, 
 
 Out-elbowing a sexton's suit of black 
 
 In Christmas glee, 
 
 Should sudden crack 
 
 His shrilly jest of shrewd hilarity, 
 
 And shake the clambering urchins from his back. 
 
 [21]
 
 T TO\s' vast the war in\*isible 
 
 Vv hen public weal battles with public will ! 
 Proudly the stars of Union hung their wreath 
 On the young nation's lordly architrave ; 
 Yet underneath 
 lis girding vaults and groins, 
 Half the fair fabric rested on the loins 
 And stooping sinews of a slave, 
 
 [22]
 
 That — raised to the just stature of a man — 
 Should rend the whole 
 
 And now the million-headed serf began 
 
 To stir in wonder. 
 
 And from the land, appalled by that low thunder, 
 
 " Kansas-Ndxaska ! " rang 
 
 The cry, and with exceeding pang 
 
 Out of the earth blood sprang 
 
 And out of men's hearts, fire. And that hot flame. 
 
 Fed by the book that burned in all men's homes. 
 
 Kindled from horizon to horizon
 
 Anguish and shame 
 
 And aspiration, by its glow 
 
 Ruddying the state-house domes 
 
 With monstrous shadows of Dred Scott 
 
 And gaunt-limbed effigies of Garrison. 
 
 Then in the destined man matured the slow 
 
 Strong grandeur of that lot 
 
 Which singled him ; till soon, 
 
 Ushered with lordly train, 
 
 The champion Douglas met him on the plain. 
 
 And the broad prairie moon 
 
 [24]
 
 Peered through white schooners at the mad bonfires 
 
 And multitudes astir, 
 
 Where — roped like wrestlers in a ring — 
 
 The Little Giant faced the Railsptitter : 
 
 And serious crowds harked silently, 
 
 With smothered taunts and ires, 
 
 While Commonsense grappled with * Sovereignty,* 
 
 Till the lank, long-armed wrestler made his fling. 
 
 And still sublime 
 
 With common sympathy, that cool 
 
 Sane manfulness survives : You cannot foot 
 
 All of the people all the time^ 
 
 [25]
 
 No ; by that power we misname fate, 
 
 'Tis character which moulds the state. 
 
 Statutes are dead when men's ideals dissent, 
 
 And public will is more than precedent, 
 
 And manhood more than constitutions can create. 
 
 Higher than bar and documental ban. 
 
 Men's highest court is still the heart of Man. 
 
 [26]
 
 V 
 
 T3 OLD to his country, sick with compromise. 
 
 Spoke the plain advocate ; 
 Half stave, half free, our Union dies. 
 But it shall live! And done with sophistries. 
 The people answered with tempestuous call 
 That shook the revolutionary dead, 
 And high on rude rails garlanded 
 Bore their backwoodsman to the Capitol.
 
 ** Who is this common huckster?" sneered the 
 
 great, 
 **This upstart Solon of the Sangamon?" 
 And chastened Douglas answered : " He is one 
 Who wrestles well for Truth." But some 
 Scowled unbelief, and some smiled bitterly ; 
 And so, beneath the derrick'd half-built dome. 
 While dumb artillery 
 
 And guards battalioned the black lonely form. 
 He took his oath. 
 We are not enemies, but friends ! 
 Yet scarce the sad rogation ends 
 
 [28]
 
 Ere the warped planks of Union split in storm 
 Of dark secession. 
 
 Then, as on a raft 
 Flood-rended, where by night the Ohio sweeps 
 Into the Mississippi, 'mid the roil 
 Of roaring waters with eroded soil 
 From hills primeval, the strong poleman keeps 
 Silence, midway the shallows and the rocks. 
 To steer his shipment safe, while fore and aft 
 The scrambling logmen scream at him, or scold 
 With prayers and malisons, or burst the locks 
 
 [29]
 
 And loot the precious bales, so — deaf and 
 
 mute 
 To sneers and imprecations both — 
 The lone Flatboatman of the Union poled 
 His country's wreck midstream, and resolute 
 Held still his goal : 
 
 To lash his ballast to the sundered half, 
 And save the whole. 
 
 '"They seek a sign. 
 
 But no sign shall be given them/* he said ; 
 
 And reaching Godward, with his pilot's gaff 
 
 [30]
 
 Probed in the dark, among the drowning and 
 
 the dead, 
 And sunk his plummet line 
 Deep in the people's heart, where still his own 
 
 heart bled, 
 And fathomed there the inundated shore 
 Swept by the flood and storm of elemental war. 
 
 [31]
 
 VI 
 
 ^ I ^HE war ! — Far on the dim verge of To-day 
 
 Its rack of livid splendor fades away. 
 The bane is past ; 
 The awful lightnings, spent, 
 Have wrought a chastening not a chastisement ; 
 The beauty and the benediction last. 
 And mustering, in season due, 
 From farthest hill 
 And hamlet — still 
 Keeping the morning last but one in May 
 
 [32]
 
 Proud with great memories — one by one, 
 
 Whose young hfe sank not with the sun 
 
 Of Gettysburg or Missionary Ridge, 
 
 Buttons his coat of blue, 
 
 And from his whitened hair 
 
 Removes the hat with golden-corded brim 
 
 And plants again old colors in old graves ; 
 
 And groups of simple children fair 
 
 And folk of middle age are there 
 
 To kneel by him. 
 
 And honor, though they cannot share, 
 
 His pensive privilege. 
 
 [33]
 
 Sdll in the Ifnug p«st we 107 lecall 
 
 Tlie war's liTe farSiote. Go to Washrngtoa 
 
 On Nev^" ^ ear's morning of EmaBcipatkn, 
 
 Wlien eicm fram Arling^ca 
 
 Befwd die C^iiiol 
 
 Tke streets asl alleys all 
 
 Soyge obck with smgiiig tiqes- Tlierecreepafew 
 
 ccx- 
 
 TnacTfl. swait and hoaiy men 
 To basl' '^rzi m tbe shi 
 That beais ai PenosylYaiiia A\ 
 
 At dtufv&Ki' spalSy
 
 To 
 Of - 
 
 kyooc 
 
 * T - 1 
 
 T T 
 
 ThrW^v! k 
 
 - t 
 
 A-,-' 
 
 lo br 
 
 CbI
 
 Till even that word which once inflamed the 
 
 land 
 Falls idle at the last : 
 What need to boast of union, being one? 
 The War is done. 
 
 Yet who that, in complacent day 
 Of peace, invokes the right divine 
 Of labor to reward itself, 
 Or vested power to hoard its pelf, 
 Reaping the enviable embrace 
 Of joy denied to others, 
 
 [36]
 
 Remembering that dark assay 
 Our country and our chief withstood, 
 When fathers sought their sons in blood 
 And brothers fought with brothers, — 
 Who then, before the memoried face 
 Of Lincoln, but must pause, and pray 
 For love like his, whose larger grace 
 Outclimbs the individual — 
 Dreadful, and yet more dear than all — 
 The love that serves our race. 
 
 [37]
 
 VII 
 
 * 
 
 ** riniO sleep, perchance to dream!'* — No 
 
 player, rapt 
 In conscious art's soliloquy, might know 
 To subtilize the poignant sense so apt 
 As he, almost in shadow of the end. 
 Murmured its latent sadness to a friend ; 
 And then he said to him: *'Ten nights ago 
 I watched alone ; the hour was very late ; 
 
 * See Note at end of volume. 
 
 [38]
 
 I fell asleep and dreamed ; 
 
 And in my dreaming, all 
 
 The White House lay in deathlike stillness 
 
 round ; 
 But soon a sobbing sound, 
 Subdued, I heard, as of innumerable 
 Mourners. I rose and went from room to room ; 
 No living being there was visible ; 
 Yet as I passed, unspeakably it seemed 
 They sobbed again, subdued. In every room 
 Light was, and all things were familiar : 
 But who were those once more 
 
 [39]
 
 Whose hearts were breaking there? What 
 heavy gloom 
 
 Wrapt their dumb grieving? Last, the east- 
 room door 
 
 I opened, and it lay before me : High 
 
 And cold on solemn catafalque it lay. 
 
 Draped in funereal vestments, and near by 
 
 Mute soldiers guarded it. In black array, 
 
 A throng of varied race 
 
 Stood weeping, 
 
 Or gazing on the covered face. 
 
 Then to a soldier : * Who is dead 
 
 [40]
 
 In the White House?' I asked. He said: 
 * The President.' 
 
 And a great moan that through the people went 
 Waked me from sleeping." 
 
 God! that a nation too should have bad dreams! 
 
 The cities all are still and voiceless all 
 
 The valleys and the w^oods : 
 
 But w^hat are these husht sounds insufferable 
 
 Of moaning multitudes ? 
 
 Through the Republic's silent house 
 
 From room to room the awful Spirit walks, 
 
 [41]
 
 Yet all things are familiar ; it seems 
 
 No change has been : 
 
 From Maine to Florida 
 
 Still flash the blue seas ; California 
 
 Is quick with April green ; 
 
 The middle ways are pied 
 
 With crocus blooms and river fleur-de-lis ; 
 
 And the great western rooms are open wide 
 
 To greet the northing sun ; 
 
 In every one 
 
 Are strewn the Saviour's lilies of white peace 
 
 In festival of him who quenched the fiery feuds. 
 
 [42]
 
 What, then, is that which mocks 
 
 The victory and grace that were before ? 
 
 Once more, and now insufferably once more- 
 
 The moan of multitudes ! 
 
 The lofty Spirit knocks 
 
 And opening last the door 
 
 Into the Capitol, with pensive head. 
 
 Stooping his deathless stature o'er the dead, 
 
 Looks there on his own image — tenderness, 
 
 Pity, on which sad truth has set its seal. 
 
 Heroic patience, strong humility. 
 
 Power, whose human courage shines not less 
 
 {43]
 
 That humor leavens the shrewd honesty : 
 Democracy's own brow — the American ideal. 
 
 While triumph pealed his consummated task, 
 And that great theatre 
 Where late he watched the war's solemnity 
 Was narrowed to a moment's comedy, 
 The sudden angel of the tragic mask 
 Flashed on his gaze the blinding sepulchre. 
 
 [44]
 
 VIII 
 
 TT was a dream! for that which fell in death, 
 Seared by the assassin's lightning, and there 
 lay 
 A spectacle for anguish, was a wraith ; 
 The real immortal Lincoln went his way 
 Back to his only home and native heath — 
 The common people's common heart. And they 
 Who speak of Lincoln to his countrymen — 
 
 [45]
 
 Now while one vast communion makes To-day 
 His temple — speak to Lincoln, born again 
 From that perennial earth 
 Whereof he had his birth, 
 And estimating him, they estimate 
 The source of all that made, and yet shall make 
 us great. 
 
 [46]
 
 IX 
 
 'TT^HE loving and the wise 
 
 May seek — but seek in vain — to analyze 
 The individual man, for having caught 
 
 The mystic clue of thought, 
 
 ^* 
 
 Sudden they meet the controverting whim, 
 And fumbling with the enchanted key, 
 Lose it then utterly. 
 
 Aesop and old Isaiah held in him ** 
 
 Strange sessions, winked at by Artemus Ward, 
 
 [47]
 
 Till sudden in their midst bright Seraphim 
 Stood, summoned by a sad, primeval bard 
 Who, bearing still no name, has ever borne 
 Within his heart the music of mankind : 
 Sometime a lonely singer blind 
 Beside the Ionian sea ; 
 Sometime, between tvv^o thieves in scorn, 
 A face in Calvary. 
 
 That vv^as his master soul — 
 
 The mystic demi-god of common man 
 
 Who, templed in the steadfast mind, 
 
 [48]
 
 Hid his shy gold of genius in the bran 
 
 Of Hoosier speech and garb, softening the wan 
 
 Strong face of shrewdness with strange aureole. 
 
 He was the madstone to his country's ire, 
 Drawing the rancorous blood of envious quarrel 
 Alike from foe and friend ; his pity, stirr'd, 
 Restored to its bough the storm-unnested bird, 
 Or raised the wallow'd pig from out the mire. 
 And he who sowed in sweat his boyhood's crop. 
 And tackled Euclid with a wooden spade. 
 And excavated Blackstone from a barrel 
 
 [49]
 
 To hold moot trials in the gloaming, made 
 
 By lighted shavings in a cooper's shop, 
 
 He is the people's still — their Railsplitter, 
 
 Himself a rail, clean-grained, of character 
 
 Self-hewn in the dark glades of Circumstance 
 
 From that deep-hearted tree 
 
 Democracy, 
 
 Which, by our race's heritage, 
 
 Reforests age on age. 
 
 Perpetual in strong fecundity. 
 
 [50]
 
 T 
 
 X 
 
 HOSE are the rails to build republics with, 
 Their homesteads and their towns. God 
 
 give us more 
 And ever more of such to build our own, 
 Enlarging still in manhood, not in stone 
 And iron merely and in metal ore : 
 
 Not men, like rails of polish'd steel. 
 Invoice-begotten breeds, that pour 
 
 [5.] 
 
 • :'^i>^
 
 Stillborn from laboring wombs of stark machines 
 
 And all alike, 
 
 With flange and spike 
 
 To couple and dovetail and serve as means 
 
 To cart more gold-dust on the commonvy^eal ; 
 
 Not those : but such as breathe 
 
 Yet of the trail, the redwood and the ranch. 
 
 The gale-swept mountain and the prairie's sheen. 
 
 And cities where the stars can still look in 
 
 And leave their benediction : common men. 
 
 Kindled by nature's awe to contemplation, 
 
 And by her goads to courage ; not too vain 
 
 [52]
 
 Of self, to show the clean knots in their grain, 
 Blazed from the same great bole that grew Abe 
 
 Lincoln's branch : 
 Such be the men of whom we build our nation ! 
 
 [53]
 
 XI 
 
 IT) UT ^^ IS more than ours, as we are more 
 Than yet the world dares dream. His 
 stature grows 
 With that illimitable state 
 Whose sovereignty ordains no tribute shore 
 And borderland of hate, 
 But grounds its justice in the joy it sows. 
 His spirit is still a power to emancipate 
 Bondage — more base, being more insidious, 
 
 [54] 
 
 I
 
 Than serfdom — that cries out in the midst of us 
 For virtue, born of opportunity, 
 And manhood, weighed in honest human worth, 
 And freedom, based in labor. He stands forth 
 'Mongst nations old — a new-world Abraham, 
 The patriarch of peoples still to be. 
 Blending all visions of the promised land 
 In one Apocalypse. 
 
 His voice is heard — 
 Thrilling the moulder'd lintels of the past- 
 In Asia ; old Thibet is stirred 
 
 [55]
 
 With warm imaginings ; 
 
 Ancestral China, 'mid her mysteries, 
 
 Unmasks, and flings 
 
 Her veils wide to the Occident ; the wand 
 
 Of hope awakes prone Hierapolis ; 
 
 Even by the straits of old that lo swam, 
 
 The immemorial sultan, sceptreless, 
 
 Stands awed ; and heartened by that bold success, 
 
 Pale Russia rises from her holocaust. 
 
 And still the emancipating influence, 
 
 The secret power, the increasing truth, are his, 
 
 [56]
 
 For they are ours : ours by the potencies 
 Poured in our nation from the founts of time, 
 Blending in us the mystic seeds of men, 
 To sow them forth again 
 For harvests more sublime 
 Throughout the world. 
 
 [57]
 
 XII 
 
 X EAVE, then, that wonted grief 
 
 Which honorably mourns its martyred dead, 
 And newly hail instead 
 The birth of him, our hardy shepherd chief. 
 Who by green paths of old democracy 
 Leads still his tribes to uplands of glad peace. 
 
 As long as — out of blood and passion blind — 
 Springs the pure justice of the reasoning mind, 
 
 [58] 

 
 And justice, bending, scorns not to obey 
 
 Pity, that once in a poor manger lay, 
 
 As long as, thraird by time's imperious will. 
 
 Brother hath bitter need of brother, still 
 
 His presence shall not cease 
 
 To lift the ages toward his human excellence. 
 
 And races yet to be 
 
 Shall in a rude hut do him reverence 
 
 And solemnize a simple man's nativity. 
 
 [59]
 
 NOTE 
 
 The dream of Lincoln, recounted in this poem, takes significance from 
 its authenticity. Shortly before his death, Lincoln actually had this dream, 
 and described it to a friend in words, -which the writer has closely followed 
 on pages 38-41, The passage. To sleep, perchance to dream, Lincoln 
 himself quoted in this connection. Cf. Norman Hapgood^s ** Abraham 
 Lincoln, the Man of the People,'^ pages 405-406. It is perhaps worthy of 
 mention that the words of Lincoln, italicized in the Ode, are also authentic, 
 being usually verbatim his own. The book, referred to at the bottom of 
 page 23, is of course "Uncle Tom^s Cabin.*' 
 
 [6i]
 
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