No More Learning

soldiers has the ma
of an axe on his skull.
The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes as an
intellectual and moral exercise I have sought to follow that poor
youth through his subsequent career, and observe how his soul
was tortured by the blood-stain, contracted as it had been before
the long custom of war had robbed human life of its sanctity,
and while it still seemed murderous to slay a brother man. This
one circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that his-
tory tells us of the fight.
When summer was dead and buried, the Old Manse became
as lonely as a hermitage. Not that ever-in my time at least-
it had been thronged with company; but at no rare intervals we
welcomed some friend out of the dusty glare and tumult of the
world, and rejoiced to share with him the transparent obscurity
that was floating over us. In one respect our precincts were like
the Enchanted Ground through which the pilgrim traveled on
XII-444
·


## p. 7090 (#488) ###########################################

7090
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
his way to the Celestial City. The guests, each and all, felt a
slumbrous influence upon them; they fell asleep in chairs, or
took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen stretched
among the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily through
the boughs. They could not have paid a more acceptable
compliment to my abode, nor to my own qualities as a host.
I held it as a proof that they left their cares behind them as
they passed between the stone gate-posts at the entrance of our
avenue, and that the so powerful opiate was the abundance of
peace and quiet within and all around us. Others could give
them pleasures and amusement or instruction - these could be
picked up anywhere; but it was for me to give them rest—rest
in a life of trouble! What better could be done for those weary
and world-worn spirits? for him whose career of perpetual action
was impeded and harassed by the rarest of his powers and the
richest of his acquirements? for another, who had thrown his
ardent heart from earliest youth into the strife of politics, and
now, perchance, began to suspect that one lifetime is too brief
for the accomplishment of any lofty aim? for her on whose
feminine nature had been imposed the heavy gift of intellectual
power such as a strong man might have staggered under, and
with it the necessity to act upon the world? —in a word, not to
multiply instances, what better could be done for anybody who
came within our magic circle than to throw the spell of a tran-
quil spirit over him? And when it had wrought its full effect,
then we dismissed him with but misty reminiscences, as if he
had been dreaming of us.
These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither
by the wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker, who
had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village.
His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with
wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrim-
ages to speak with him face to face. Young visionaries, to whom
just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a
labyrinth around them, came to seek the clue that should guide
them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theo-
rists, whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in
an iron framework, traveled painfully to his door, not to ask
deliverance but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom.
People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that
they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering


## p. 7091 (#489) ###########################################

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7091
gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value.
Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of
a moral world beheld its intellectual fire as a beacon burning
on a hill-top, and climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into
the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto. The
light revealed objects unseen before,-mountains, gleaming lakes,
glimpses of a creation among the chaos; but also, as was un-
avoidable, it attracted bats and owls and the whole host of night
birds, which flapped their dusky wings against the gazer's eyes,
and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of angelic feather. Such
delusions always hover nigh whenever a beacon fire of truth is
kindled.
For myself, there had been epochs of my life when I too
might have asked of this prophet the master word that should
solve me the riddle of the universe; but now, being happy, I
felt as if there were no question to be put, and therefore admired
Emerson as a poet of deep beauty and austere tenderness, but
sought nothing from him as a philosopher. It was good never-
theless to meet him in the wood paths, or sometimes in our
avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his pres-
ence like the garment of a Shining One; and he so quiet, so
simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alike as if
expecting to receive more than he could impart. And in truth,
the heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions
which he could not read. But it was impossible to dwell in his
vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere
of his lofty thought, which in the brains of some people wrought
a singular giddiness,-new truth being as heady as new wine.
Never was a poor little country village infested with such a
variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most
of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the
world's destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense water.
Such, I imagine, is the invariable character of persons who crowd
so closely about an original thinker as to draw in his unuttered.
breath, and thus to become imbued with a false originality. This
triteness of novelty is enough to make any man of common-sense
blaspheme at all ideas of less than a century's standing, and pray
that the world may be petrified and rendered immovable in pre-
cisely the worst moral and physical state that it ever yet arrived
at, rather than be benefited by such schemes of such philoso-
phers.


## p. 7092 (#490) ###########################################

7092
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the
scattered reminiscences of a single summer. In fairyland there
is no measurement of time; and in a spot so sheltered from the
turmoil of life's ocean, three years hasten away with a noiseless
flight, as the breezy sunshine chases the cloud shadows across
the depths of a still valley. Now came hints, growing more and
more distinct, that the owner of the old house was pining for his
native air. Carpenters next appeared, making a tremendous
racket among the outbuildings, strewing the green grass with
pine shavings and chips of chestnut joists, and vexing the whole
antiquity of the place with their discordant renovations. Soon,
moreover, they divested our abode of the veil of woodbine which
had crept over a large portion of its southern face. All the
aged mosses were cleared unsparingly away, and there were hor-
rible whispers about brushing up the external walls with a coat
of paint,—a purpose as little to my taste as might be that of
rouging the venerable cheeks of one's grandmother. But the
hand that renovates is always more sacrilegious than that which
destroys. In fine, we gathered up our household goods, drank a
farewell cup of tea in our pleasant little breakfast-room,- deli-
cately fragrant tea, an unpurchasable luxury, one of the many
angel gifts that had fallen like dew upon us,—and passed forth
between the tall stone gate-posts, as uncertain as the wandering
Arabs where our tent might next be pitched. Providence took
me by the hand, and-an oddity of dispensation which, I trust,
there is no irreverence in smiling at-has led me, as the news-
papers announce, while I am writing from the Old Manse, into a
custom-house. As a story-teller I have often contrived strange
vicissitudes for my imaginary personages, but none like this.
THE FAUN'S TRANSFORMATION
From The Marble Faun'
TH
HE door of the court-yard swung slowly, and closed itself of
its own accord. Miriam and Donatello were now alone
there. She clasped her hands and looked wildly at the
young man, whose form seemed to have dilated, and whose eyes
blazed with the fierce energy that had suddenly inspired him. It
had kindled him into a man; it had developed within him an


## p. 7093 (#491) ###########################################

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7093
intelligence which was no native characteristic of the Donatello.
whom we have heretofore known. But that simple and joyous
creature was gone forever.
"What have you done? " said Miriam in a horror-stricken
whisper.
The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello's face, and now
flashed out again from his eyes.
"I did what ought to be done to a traitor! " he replied. "I
did what your eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine,
as I held the wretch over the precipice! "
These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so?
had her eyes provoked or assented to this deed? She had not
known it. But alas! looking back into the frenzy and turmoil
of the scene just acted, she could not deny-she was not sure
whether it might be so or no- that a wild joy had flamed up in
her heart when she beheld her persecutor in his mortal peril.
Was it horror? or ecstasy? or both in one? Be the emotion what
it might, it had blazed up more madly when Donatello flung his
victim off the cliff, and more and more while his shriek went
quivering downward. With the dead thump upon the stones
below had come an unutterable horror.
"And my eyes bade you do it! " repeated she.
They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as
earnestly as if some inestimable treasure had fallen over, and
were yet recoverable. On the pavement below was a dark mass
lying in a heap, with little or nothing human in its appearance,
except that the hands were stretched out, as if they might have
clutched for a moment at the small square stones. But there was
no motion in them now. Miriam watched the heap of mortality
while she could count a hundred, which she took pains to do. No
stir; not a finger moved!
"You have killed him, Donatello! he is quite dead! " said she.
"Stone dead! Would I were so too! "
"Did you not mean that he should die? " sternly asked Dona-
tello, still in the glow of that intelligence which passion had
developed in him. "There was short time to weigh the matter;
but he had his trial in that breath or two while I held him over
the cliff, and his sentence in that one glance when your eyes
responded to mine! Say that I have slain him against your will,
say that he died without your whole consent,- and in another
breath you shall see me lying beside him. "


## p. 7094 (#492) ###########################################

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7094
"Oh, never! " cried Miriam. "My one, own friend! Never,
never, never! ”
She turned to him,-the guilty, blood-stained, lonely woman,
-she turned to her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately inno-
cent, whom she had drawn into her doom. She pressed him.
close, close to her bosom, with a clinging embrace that brought
their two hearts together, till the horror and agony of each was
combined into one emotion, and that a kind of rapture.
"Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth! " said she: "my heart
consented to what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The
deed knots us together for time and eternity, like the coil of a
serpent! "
They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to
assure themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the
whole thing. Then they turned from that fatal precipice, and
came out of the court-yard, arm in arm, heart in heart. In-
stinctively, they were heedful not to sever themselves so much
as a pace or two from one another, for fear of the terror and
deadly chill that would thenceforth wait for them in solitude.
Their deed-the crime which Donatello wrought, and Miriam
accepted on the instant-had wreathed itself, as she said, like a
serpent in inextricable links about both their souls, and drew
them into one, by its terrible contractile power. It was closer
than a marriage bond. So intimate in those first moments was
the union, that it seemed as if their new sympathy annihilated all
other ties, and that they were released from the chain of human-
ity; a new sphere, a special law, had been created for them
alone. The world could not come near them: they were safe!
When they reached the flight of steps leading downward from
the Capitol, there was a far-off noise of singing and laughter.
Swift indeed had been the rush of the crisis that was come and
gone! This was still the merriment of the party that had so
recently been their companions; they recognized the voices which,
a little while ago, had accorded and sung in cadence with their
own. But they were familiar voices no more; they sounded
strangely, and as it were, out of the depths of space; so remote
was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, in the
moral seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them.
But how close and ever closer did the breadth of the immeasur-
able waste that lay between them and all brotherhood or sister-
hood, now press them one within the other!


## p. 7095 (#493) ###########################################

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7095
"O friend! " cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word
that it took a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to
have been spoken before,-"O friend, are you conscious, as I
am, of this companionship that knits our heart-strings together? »
"I feel it, Miriam," said Donatello. "We draw one breath;
we live one life! "
"Only yesterday," continued Miriam,-"nay, only a short
half-hour ago, I shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no
sisterhood, could come near enough to keep the warmth within
my heart.
In an instant all is changed! There can be no more
loneliness! "
"None, Miriam! " said Donatello.
«< None, my beautiful one! " responded Miriam, gazing in his
face, which had taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect from
the strength of passion. "None, my innocent one! Surely it is
no crime that we have committed. One wretched and worthless
life has been sacrificed to cement two other lives for evermore. "
"For evermore, Miriam! " said Donatello; "cemented with his
blood! "
The young man started at the word which he had himself
spoken; it may be that it brought home to the simplicity of his
imagination what he had not before dreamed of,-the ever-
increasing loathsomeness of a union that consists in guilt. Ce-
mented with blood, which would corrupt and grow more noisome
for ever and for ever, but bind them none the less strictly for
that!
"Forget it! Cast it all behind you! " said Miriam, detecting
by her sympathy the pang that was in his heart. "The deed has
done its office, and has no existence any more. ”
They flung the past behind them, as she counseled, or else
distilled from it a fiery intoxication which sufficed to carry them
triumphantly through those first moments of their doom. For
guilt has its moment of rapture too. The foremost result of a
broken law is ever an ecstatic sense of freedom. And thus there
exhaled upward (out of their dark sympathy, at the base of which
lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an insanity, which the unhappy
pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy innocence that was
forever lost to them.
As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion
they went onward,-not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a
stately gait and aspect. Passion lent them (as it does to meaner


## p. 7096 (#494) ###########################################

7096
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
shapes) its brief nobility of carriage. They trode through the
streets of Rome as if they too were among the majestic and
guilty shadows, that from ages long gone by have haunted the
blood-stained city. And at Miriam's suggestion they turned aside,
for the sake of treading loftily past the old site of Pompey's
forum.
"For there was a great deed done here! " she said, "a deed
of blood, like ours! Who knows but we may meet the high and
ever sad fraternity of Cæsar's murderers, and exchange a saluta-
tion ? »
-
"Are they our brethren now? " asked Donatello.
"Yes; all of them," said Miriam; "and many another, whom
the world little dreams of, has been made our brother or our
sister by what we have done within this hour! "
And at the thought she shivered. Where then was the seclus-
ion, the remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which
she and her one companion had been transported by their crime?
Was there indeed no such refuge, but only a crowded thorough-
fare and jostling throng of criminals? And was it true that
whatever hand had a blood-stain on it, or had poured out poison,
or strangled a babe at its birth, or clutched a grandsire's throat,
he sleeping, and robbed him of his few last breaths, had now the
right to offer itself in fellowship with their two hands? Too cer-
tainly that right existed. It is a terrible thought, that an indi-
vidual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of human crime,
and makes us, who dreamed only of our own little separate sin,-
makes us guilty of the whole. And thus Miriam and her lover
were not an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable con-
fraternity of guilty ones, all shuddering at each other.


## p. 7097 (#495) ###########################################

7097
JOHN HAY
(1838-)
B
ORN in 1838 at Salem, Indiana, of Scotch ancestry, John Hay
passed his early years as does the average intelligent West-
ern boy. When only twenty he was graduated from Brown
University, where his work in English composition was thought to
indicate literary ability. Studying law at Springfield, Illinois, he
began practice there in 1861; but soon after accompanied President
Lincoln to Washington as his assistant secretary, and acting as adju-
tant and aide also, grew into close intimacy with the statesman whose
biographer he became. Like most ardent
young men of his time, he entered the
army, attaining the brevet rank of colonel
and assistant adjutant-general. His large
opportunities for meeting men, his gift for
making friends, and his tactful good sense,
especially qualified him for his later diplo-
matic career.

Soon after the war Colonel Hay went
as Secretary of Legation to Paris, where his
careful study of French political conditions
appears in several of his poems; among
them Sunrise in the Place de la Concorde,'
JOHN HAY
The Sphinx of the Tuileries,' and 'A
Triumph of Order. ' Sent afterwards to
Vienna, he was presently transferred to Madrid as chargé d'affaires.
'Castilian Days' reflects in delightful colors the pleasure he found
in the history, the romance, and the beauty of Spain; a pleasure
which shows an odd background of American practicality, and a dem-
ocratic conviction that kings and nobles are as fallible as other men.
He greatly admired Castelar, whose acquaintance he made, and trans-
lated for American readers his treatise upon The Republican Move-
ment in Europe. '
Returning to New York in 1871, Hay joined the staff of the
New York Tribune. Pike County Ballads,' his second publication,
issued in 1871, celebrated in Western dialect the heroism of drinking
pilots, swearing engineers, and godless settlers, and caught the fancy
of the public by means of its vivid local color and dramatic quality.
Some years later these verses were republished in the same volume


## p. 7098 (#496) ###########################################

7098
JOHN HAY
with his miscellaneous poems, his 'Wanderlieder,' and his transla-
tions.
His most important work is the comprehensive history of the life
and times of Abraham Lincoln, written in collaboration with John
George Nicolay, the great President's private secretary. Appearing
first in the Century Magazine, this was published in ten large vol-
umes, which offer a careful historical survey of the whole period
of the Civil War, and of the conditions which made it inevitable.
Thoroughly understanding the character and motives of Lincoln, and
himself a spectator and an actor in the great drama he describes,
Colonel Hay's pages are vividly written, and often touched with per-
sonal emotion.
Valuable as this history may prove, however, to the serious reader,
in 'Castilian Days' lies the true obligation of the lover of literature
to Colonel Hay. When it appeared, the general voice of criticism
pronounced it the best book on Spain in the English language. Wide
knowledge of the great monarchy of the past, full sympathy with
the new republic of the hour, the point of view of the man of letters,
the poet, the curious student of social life, and the observer of poli-
tics rather than the politician, - these the Western critic brought to
the occasion. He saw everything; he weighed and measured customs,
institutions, and men; and he wrote down his descriptions and con-
clusions in a style whose brilliancy would have degenerated into hard-
ness, had it not been saved by a good-natured humor, and a temper
of unusual moderation. And if the republic in which the sound
republican so hopefully believed is long since swept away, his book
remains no less faithful an interpretation of the Spanish character,
and no less possible a forecast of the future of the Spanish people.
LINCOLN'S DEATH AND FAME
From Abraham Lincoln: a History. Copyright 1886 and 1890, by John G.
Nicolay and John Hay, and reprinted by permission of Mr. Hay and the
Century Co. , publishers, New York.
IN
IN FACT, it was among the common people of the entire civilized
world that the most genuine and spontaneous manifestations
of sorrow and appreciation were produced, and to this fact we
attribute the sudden and solid foundation of Lincoln's fame. It
requires years, perhaps centuries, to build the structure of a rep-
utation which rests upon the opinion of those distinguished for
learning or intelligence; the progress of opinion from the few to
the many is slow and painful. But in the case of Lincoln the
many imposed their opinion all at once; he was canonized, as he


## p. 7099 (#497) ###########################################

JOHN HAY
7099
lay on his bier, by the irresistible decree of countless millions.
The greater part of the aristocracy of England thought little of
him; but the burst of grief from the English people silenced in
an instant every discordant voice. It would have been as impru-
dent to speak slightingly of him in London as it was in New
York. Especially among the Dissenters was honor and reverence
shown to his name. The humbler people instinctively felt that
their order had lost its wisest champion.
Not only among those of Saxon blood was this outburst of
emotion seen. In France a national manifestation took place,
which the government disliked but did not think it wise to sup-
press. The students of Paris marched in a body to the American
Legation to express their sympathy. A two-cent subscription was
started to strike a massive gold medal; the money was soon
raised, but the committee was forced to have the work done in
Switzerland. A committee of French Liberals brought the medal
to the American minister, to be sent to Mrs. Lincoln. "Tell
her," said Eugène Pelletan, "the heart of France is in that little
box. "
The inscription had a double sense; while honoring the
dead republican, it struck at the Empire: "Lincoln- the Honest
Man; abolished Slavery, re-established the Union; Saved the Re-
public, without veiling the Statue of Liberty. "
Everywhere on the Continent the same swift apotheosis of the
people's hero was seen.
An Austrian deputy said to the writer,
"Among my people his memory has already assumed superhuman
proportions; he has become a myth, a type of ideal democracy. ”
Almost before the earth closed over him he began to be the sub-
ject of fable. The Freemasons of Europe generally regard him
as one of them-his portrait in Masonic garb is often displayed;
yet he was not one of that brotherhood. The Spiritualists claim
him as their most illustrious adept, but he was not a Spiritualist;
and there is hardly a sect in the Western world, from the Calvin-
ist to the atheist, but affects to believe he was of their opinion.
A collection of the expressions of sympathy and condolence
which came to Washington from foreign governments, associa-
tions, and public bodies of all sorts, was made by the State De-
partment, and afterwards published by order of Congress. It
forms a large quarto of a thousand pages, and embraces the
utterances of grief and regret from every country under the sun,
in almost every language spoken by man.
But admired and venerated as he was in Europe, he was best
understood and appreciated at home. It is not to be denied that


## p. 7100 (#498) ###########################################

7100
JOHN HAY
He
in his case, as in that of all heroic personages who occupy a
great place in history, a certain element of legend mingles with
his righteous fame. He was a man, in fact, especially liable to
legend. We have been told by farmers in central Illinois that
the brown thrush did not sing for a year after he died.
He was
gentle and merciful, and therefore he seems in a certain class of
annals to have passed all his time in soothing misfortune and
pardoning crime. He had more than his share of the shrewd
native humor, and therefore the loose jest-books of two centuries
have been ransacked for anecdotes to be attributed to him. He
was a great and powerful lover of mankind, especially of those
not favored by fortune. One night he had a dream, which he
repeated the next morning to the writer of these lines, which
quaintly illustrates his unpretending and kindly democracy.
was in some great assembly; the people made a lane to let him
"He is a common-looking fellow," some one said. Lincoln
in his dream turned to his critic and replied in his Quaker phrase,
"Friend, the Lord prefers common-looking people; that is why
he made so many of them. " He that abases himself shall be
exalted. Because Lincoln kept himself in such constant sympathy
with the common people, whom he respected too highly to flatter
or mislead, he was rewarded by a reverence and a love hardly
ever given to a human being. Among the humble working
people of the South whom he had made free, this veneration
and affection easily passed into the supernatural. At a religious
meeting among the negroes of the Sea Islands a young man
expressed the wish that he might see Lincoln. A gray-headed
negro rebuked the rash aspiration: "No man see Linkum. Lin-
kum walk as Jesus walk; no man see Linkum. ”
pass.
But leaving aside these fables, which are a natural enough
expression of a popular awe and love, it seems to us that no
more just estimate of Lincoln's relation to his time has ever been
made, nor perhaps ever will be, than that uttered by one of the
wisest and most American of thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a
few days after the assassination. We cannot forbear quoting a
few words of this remarkable discourse, which shows how Lin-
coln seemed to the greatest of his contemporaries:-
――
"A plain man of the people, an extraordinary fortune attended.
him. Lord Bacon says, 'Manifest virtues procure reputation; occult
ones fortune. ' . . . His occupying the chair of State was a triumph
of the good sense of mankind and of the public conscience.
He grew according to the need; his mind mastered the problem of


## p. 7101 (#499) ###########################################

JOHN HAY
7101
the day; and as the problem grew, so did his comprehension of it.
Rarely was a man so fitted to the event.
It cannot be said
that there is any exaggeration of his worth. If ever a man was
fairly tested, he was. There was no lack of resistance, nor of slan-
der, nor of ridicule.
Then what an occasion was the whirl-
wind of the war! Here was no place for holiday magistrate, nor
fair-weather sailor; the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tor-
nado. In four years—four years of battle days - his endurance, his
fertility of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never
found wanting. There by his courage, his justice, his even temper,
his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the centre
of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American people in
his time; the true representative of this continent-father of his
country; the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the
thought of their minds articulated by his tongue. "
·
The quick instinct by which the world recognized him even
at the moment of his death as one of its greatest men, was not
deceived. It has been confirmed by the sober thought of a
quarter of a century. The writers of each nation compare him
with their first popular hero. The French find points of resem-
blance in him to Henry IV. ; the Dutch liken him to William of
Orange: the cruel stroke of murder and treason by which all
three perished in the height of their power naturally suggests the
comparison, which is strangely justified in both cases, though
the two princes were so widely different in character. Lincoln
had the wit, the bonhomie, the keen practical insight into affairs,
of the Béarnais; and the tyrannous moral sense, the wide com-
prehension, the heroic patience of the Dutch patriot, whose motto
might have served equally well for the American President-
"Sævis tranquillus in undis. " European historians speak of him
in words reserved for the most illustrious names. Merle d'Au-
bigné says, "The name of Lincoln will remain one of the great-
est that history has to inscribe on its annals. " Henri Martin
predicts nothing less than a universal apotheosis: "This man
will stand out in the traditions of his country and the world as
an incarnation of the people, and of modern democracy itself. "
Emilio Castelar, in an oration against slavery in the Spanish
Cortes, called him "humblest of the humble before his con-
science, greatest of the great before history. "
In this country, where millions still live who were his con-
temporaries, and thousands who knew him personally; where the
-


## p. 7102 (#500) ###########################################

7102
JOHN HAY
envies and jealousies which dog the footsteps of success still
linger in the hearts of a few; where journals still exist that
loaded his name for four years with daily calumny, and writers
of memoirs vainly try to make themselves important by belittling
him, his fame has become as universal as the air, as deeply
rooted as the hills. The faint discords are not heard in the wide
chorus that hails him second to none and equaled by Washing-
ton alone. The eulogies of him form a special literature. Preach-
ers, poets, soldiers, and statesmen employ the same phrases of
unconditional love and reverence. Men speaking with the author-
ity of fame use unqualified superlatives. Lowell in an immortal
ode calls him "new birth of our new soil, the first American. "
General Sherman says, "Of all the men I ever met, he seemed
to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with
goodness, than any other. " General Grant, after having met the
rulers of almost every civilized country on earth, said Lincoln
impressed him as the greatest intellectual force with which he
had ever come in contact.
―――――
He is spoken of with scarcely less of enthusiasm by the more
generous and liberal spirits among those who revolted against
his election and were vanquished by his power. General Long-
street calls him "the greatest man of Rebellion times, the one
matchless among forty millions for the peculiar difficulties of the
period. " An eminent Southern orator, referring to our mixed
Northern and Southern ancestry, says: "From the union of those
colonists, from the straightening of their purposes and the cross-
ing of their blood, slowly perfecting through a century, came he
who stands as the first typical American, the first who compre-
hended within himself all the strength and gentleness, all the
majesty and grace of this republic - Abraham Lincoln. "
It is not difficult to perceive the basis of this sudden and
world-wide fame, nor rash to predict its indefinite duration.
There are two classes of men whose names are more enduring
than any monument: the great writers, and the men of great
achievement, the founders of States, the conquerors. Lincoln
has the singular fortune to belong to both these categories; upon
these broad and stable foundations his renown is securely built.
Nothing would have more amazed him while he lived than to
hear himself called a man of letters; but this age has produced
few greater writers. We are only recording here the judgment
of his peers.
Emerson ranks him with sop and Pilpay, in his


## p. 7103 (#501) ###########################################

JOHN HAY
7103
lighter moods, and says: "The weight and penetration of many
passages in his letters, messages, and speeches, hidden now by
the very closeness of their application to the moment, are des-
tined to a wide fame. What pregnant definitions, what unerring
common-sense, what foresight, and on great occasions what lofty,
and more than national, what human tone! His brief speech at
Gettysburg will not easily be surpassed by words on any recorded
occasion. "
His style extorted the high praise of French Academicians;
Montalembert commended it as a model for the imitation of
princes. Many of his phrases form part of the common speech
of mankind. It is true that in his writings the range of sub-
jects is not great; he is concerned chiefly with the political prob-
lems of the time, and the moral considerations involved in them.
But the range of treatment is remarkably wide; it runs from the
wit, the gay humor, the florid eloquence of his stump speeches to
the marvelous sententiousness and brevity of the letter to Greeley
and the address of Gettysburg, and the sustained and lofty grand-
eur of the Second Inaugural.
The more his writings are studied in connection with the
important transactions of his age, the higher will his reputation
stand in the opinion of the lettered class. But the men of study
and research are never numerous; and it is principally as a man
of action that the world at large will regard him. It is the story
of his objective life that will forever touch and hold the heart of
mankind. His birthright was privation and ignorance-not pecul-
iar to his family, but the universal environment of his place and
time; he burst through those enchaining conditions by the force
of native genius and will: vice had no temptation for him; his
course was as naturally upward as the skylark's; he won, against
all conceivable obstacles, a high place in an exacting profession
and an honorable position in public and private life; he became
the foremost representative of a party founded on an uprising of
the national conscience against a secular wrong, and thus came
to the awful responsibilities of power in a time of terror and
gloom. He met them with incomparable strength and virtue.
Caring for nothing but the public good, free from envy or jealous
fears, he surrounded himself with the leading men of his party,
his most formidable rivals in public esteem, and through four
years of stupendous difficulties he was head and shoulders above
them all in the vital qualities of wisdom, foresight, knowledge


## p. 7104 (#502) ###########################################

7104
JOHN HAY
of men, and thorough comprehension of measures. Personally
opposed, as the radicals claim, by more than half of his own
party in Congress, and bitterly denounced and maligned by his
open adversaries, he yet bore himself with such extraordinary
discretion and skill that he obtained for the government all the
legislation it required, and so impressed himself upon the national
mind that without personal effort or solicitation he became the
only possible candidate of his party for re-election, and was
chosen by an almost unanimous vote of the electoral colleges.
His qualities would have rendered his administration illustri-
ous even in time of peace; but when we consider that in addition
to the ordinary work of the executive office, he was forced to
assume the duties of commander-in-chief of the national forces
engaged in the most complex and difficult war of modern times,
the greatness of spirit as well as the intellectual strength he
evinced in that capacity is nothing short of prodigious. After-
times will wonder, not at the few and unimportant mistakes he
may have committed, but at the intuitive knowledge of his busi-
ness that he displayed. We would not presume to express a
personal opinion in this matter. We use the testimony only of
the most authoritative names. General W. T. Sherman has
repeatedly expressed the admiration and surprise with which he
has read Mr. Lincoln's correspondence with his generals, and his
opinion of the remarkable correctness of his military views.
General W. F. Smith says:-"I have long held to the opinion
that at the close of the war Mr. Lincoln was the superior of his
generals in his comprehension of the effect of strategic move-
ments and the proper method of following up victories to their
legitimate conclusions. " General J. H. Wilson holds the same
opinion; and Colonel Robert N. Scott, in whose lamented death
the army lost one of its most vigorous and best trained intel-
lects, frequently called Mr. Lincoln "the ablest strategist of the
war. "
To these qualifications of high literary excellence, and easy
practical mastery of affairs of transcendent importance, we must
add, as an explanation of his immediate and world-wide fame, his
possession of certain moral qualities rarely combined in such high
degree in one individual. His heart was so tender that he would
dismount from his horse in a forest to replace in their nest young
birds which had fallen by the roadside; he could not sleep at night
if he knew that a soldier-boy was under sentence of death; he


## p. 7105 (#503) ###########################################

JOHN HAY
7105
could not, even at the bidding of duty or policy, refuse the prayer
of age or helplessness in distress. Childern instinctively loved
him; they never found his rugged features ugly; his sympathies
were quick and seemingly unlimited. He was absolutely without
prejudice of class or condition. Frederick Douglass says he was
the only man of distinction he ever met who never reminded him,
by word or manner, of his color; he was as just and generous to
the rich and well-born as to the poor and humble-a thing rare
among politicians. He was tolerant even of evil: though no man
can ever have lived with a loftier scorn of meanness and selfish-
ness, he yet recognized their existence and counted with the
He said one day, with a flash of cynical wisdom worthy of a La
Rochefoucauld, that honest statesmanship was the employment of
individual meanness for the public good. He never asked per-
fection of any one; he did not even insist, for others, upon the
high standards he set up for himself. At a time before the word
was invented he was the first of opportunists. With the fire of a
reformer and a martyr in his heart, he yet proceeded by the ways
of cautious and practical statecraft. He always worked with
things as they were, while never relinquishing the desire and
effort to make them better. To a hope which saw the Delectable
Mountains of absolute justice and peace in the future, to a faith
that God in his own time would give to all men the things con-
venient to them, he added a charity which embraced in its deep
bosom all the good and the bad, all the virtues and the infirmi-
ties of men, and a patience like that of nature, which in its vast
and fruitful activity knows neither haste nor rest.
A character like this is among the precious heirlooms of the
republic; and by a special good fortune, every part of the coun-
try has an equal claim and pride in it. Lincoln's blood came from
the veins of New England emigrants, of Middle-State Quakers, of
Virginia planters, of Kentucky pioneers; he himself was one of
the men who grew up with the earliest growth of the Great West.
Every jewel of his mind or his conduct sheds radiance on each
portion of the nation. The marvelous symmetry and balance of
his intellect and character may have owed something to this
varied environment of his race, and they may fitly typify the
variety and solidity of the republic. It may not be unreasonable
to hope that his name and his renown may be forever a bond of
union to the country which he loved with an affection so impar-
tial, and served, in life and in death, with such entire devotion.
XII-445


## p. 7106 (#504) ###########################################

7106
JOHN HAY
[These poems are copyrighted, and are reprinted here by permission of Mr.
Hay]
WHEN PHYLLIS LAUGHS
THEN Phyllis laughs, in sweet surprise
WHE My heart asks if my dazzling eyes
Or if my ears take more delight
In luscious sound or beauty bright,
When Phyllis laughs.
In crinkled eyelids hid Love lies,
In the soft curving lips I prize
Promise of raptures infinite,
When Phyllis laughs.
Far to the Orient fancy flies.
I see beneath Idalian skies,
Clad only in the golden light,
Calm in perfection's peerless might,
The laughter-loving Venus rise,
When Phyllis laughs.
NIGHT IN VENICE
OVE, in this summer night, do you recall
Midnight, and Venice, and those skies of June
Thick-sown with stars, when from the still lagoon
We glided noiseless through the dim canal?
A sense of some belated festival
Hung round us, and our own hearts beat in tune
With passionate memories that the young moon
Lit up on dome and tower and palace wall.
We dreamed what ghosts of vanished loves made part
Of that sweet light and trembling, amorous air.
I felt in those rich beams that kissed your hair,
Those breezes warm with bygone lovers' sighs-
All the dead beauty of Venice in your eyes,
All the old loves of Venice in my heart.


## p. 7107 (#505) ###########################################

JOHN HAY
7107
A
[These poems are copyrighted, and are reprinted here by permission of Mr.
Hay and of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston. ]
A WOMAN'S LOVE
SENTINEL angel sitting high in glory
Heard this shrill wail ring out from purgatory:—
"Have mercy, mighty angel,-hear my story!
"I loved, and blind with passionate love, I fell.
Love brought me down to death, and death to hell;
For God is just, and death for sin is well.
"I do not rage against his high decree,
Nor for myself do ask that grace shall be,
But for my love on earth who mourns for me.
"Great Spirit! Let me see my love again
And comfort him one hour, and I were fain
To pay a thousand years of fire and pain. "
Then said the pitying angel: "Nay, repent
That wild vow! Look, the dial finger's bent
Down to the last hour of thy punishment! "
But still she wailed: "I pray thee, let me go!
I cannot rise to peace and leave him so.
Oh, let me soothe him in his bitter woe! »
The brazen gates ground sullenly ajar,
And upward, joyous, like a rising star,
She rose and vanished in the ether far.
But soon adown the dying sunset sailing,
And like a wounded bird her pinions trailing,
She fluttered back, with broken-hearted wailing.
She sobbed, "I found him by the summer sea
Reclined, his head upon a maiden's knee -
She curled his hair and kissed him. Woe is me! "
She wept, "Now let my punishment begin!
I have been fond and foolish. Let me in
To expiate my sorrow and my sin. ”
The angel answered, "Nay, sad soul, go higher!
To be deceived in your true heart's desire
Was bitterer than a thousand years of fire! "


## p. 7108 (#506) ###########################################

7108
JOHN HAY
JIM BLUDSO, OF THE PRAIRIE BELLE
WALL
VALL, no! I can't tell whar he lives,
Becase he don't live, you see;
Leastways, he's got out of the habit
Of livin' like you and me.
Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven't heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?
He weren't no saint, - them engineers
Is all pretty much alike:
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill,
And another one here in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never funked, and he never lied,-
I reckon he never knowed how.
And this was all the religion he had:
To treat his engine well;
Never be passed on the river;
To mind the pilot's bell;
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,—
A thousand times he swore
He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.
All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last,—
The Movastar was a better boat,
But the Belle she wouldn't be passed.
And so she come tearin' along, that night-
The oldest craft on the line-
With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.
The fire bust out as she clared the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,
And quick as a flash she turned, and made
For the willer-bank on the right.
There was runnin' and cursin', but Jim yelled out,
Over all the infernal roar,
"I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot's ashore. "


## p. 7109 (#507) ###########################################

JOHN HAY
7109
Through the hot black breath of the burnin' boat
Jim Bludso's voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And sure's you're born, they all got off
Afore the smoke-stacks fell,-
And Bludso's ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.
He weren't no saint-but at judgment
I'd run my chance with Jim,
'Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn't shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain't agoing to be too hard
On a man that died for men.


## p. 7110 (#508) ###########################################

7110
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
(1830-1886)
F REVOLUTIONARY ancestry, and the only son of an officer in
the United States naval service, Paul Hamilton Hayne was
born in Charleston, South Carolina, January 1st, 1830. Few
American poets have grown up with outward circumstances more
kindly toward a literary career and its practical risks. A name of
high local distinction, wealth, and associations with men of letters,
were part of Hayne's environment from the beginning. The literary
gatherings in the Hayne household, in which William Gilmore Simms,
PAUL H. HAYNE
John C. Calhoun, and Hugh S. Legaré were
prominent, drew all Charleston's intellectual
life at the time to a common centre.

Hayne was a graduate in 1850 of the col-
lege of his native city. For a time he studied
law. With the outbreak of the Civil War he
took service, and was on the staff of Gen-
eral Pickens. Broken health induced him
unwillingly to resign. With the bombard-
ment of Charleston and the advance of the
Federal army he suffered severe losses; his
costly house, his library, and pretty much
all his belongings being swept away by
fire or pillage. A ruined man pecuniarily,
he betook himself to the Pine Barrens of
Georgia. There he built himself a cottage at Copse Hill. There
he gardened, wrote verses, kept up his correspondence with the outer
world, corrected his proofs, and it is said "was perfectly happy" dur-
ing more than fifteen years, until his death in 1886. He was much
of an invalid by constitution; and with his frail vitality, his accom-
plishing so much is a striking example of the will to live and to do
what we wish to do.
Mr. Hayne's early literary work was connected with the Southern
Literary Messenger, to which so many of the South's poets were
contributors at one time or another. Later he became editor of the
Charleston Literary Gazette, and held a post on the Charleston Even-
ing News. In 1872 appeared his 'Legends and Lyrics,' one collection
of his poems; in 1873 his edition of the literary remains of his friend


## p. 7111 (#509) ###########################################

PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
7111
Timrod, with a sympathetic biography; in 1875 he published 'The
Mountain of the Lovers,'-like The Wife of Brittany,' one of his
long poems,—and in later succession we have other titles; with his
poems in a complete edition in 1882.
Mr. Hayne's verse largely reflects aspects of nature in the South-
ern United States. There is a strong influence of Wordsworth in
much of his writing. In other descriptive poetry, and in that of a
reflective or dramatic spirit, he won a measurable success, occasion-
ally coming into obvious poetical touch with Robert Browning. His
sonnets are a large element of his writing; a species of verse in
which he delighted, his meditative humor finding it, over and over
again, a vehicle at once suitable and congenial.
All the citations following are from the Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne,'
copyright 1882 by D. Lothrop & Co. , and are reprinted here by per-
mission of the family of Mr. Hayne, and of the publishers.
ODE TO SLEEP
EYOND the sunset and the amber sea
B
To the lone depths of ether, cold and bare,
Thy influence, soul of all tranquillity,
Hallows the earth and awes the reverent air;
Yon laughing rivulet quells its silvery tune;
The pines, like priestly watchers tall and grim,
Stand mute against the pensive twilight dim,
Breathless to hail the advent of the moon;
From the white beach the ocean falls away
Coyly, and with a thrill; the sea-birds dart
Ghostlike from out the distance, and depart
With a gray fleetness, moaning the dead day;
The wings of Silence, overfolding space,
Droop with dusk grandeur from the heavenly steep,
And through the stillness gleams thy starry face,-
Serenest Angel, Sleep!