Lincoln's favorite poem

(From speech by Chauncey Depew at centenary celebration.)

 President Lincoln rarely, with all his wit, humor and faculty for apt illustration, said anything which would hurt the feelings of his hearer. He cared little for poetry, but in early youth he had found in an old almanac a poem which he committed to memory and repeated often all through his life. It was entitled "Mortality," and the first verse was:

  “Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

 Like a fast-flitting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,

 A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,

 He passes from life to his rest in the grave,"

He reverenced the sentiment of that poem. Prob­ably reminiscent of the loved and lost he often repeated this verse from Oliver Wendell Holmes:

           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.

"With malice toward none, with charity for all." This line, in one of his inaugurals, summed up the philosophy of his life. He was six feet four inches in height, with muscles of steel, and in early life among the rough, cruel, hard-drinking youth of the neighbor­hood was the strongest of them all, but his strength was always used to protect the weak against the strong, and to humble the bully, who is the terror of such communities. During his youth and early manhood he lived where drinking was so common it was the habit, and the young men were all addicted to whiskey and tobacco chewing, but the singular purity of his nature was such that notwithstanding the ridicule of his surroundings, he never used either alcohol or tobacco. He is our only President who came to that great office from absolutely original American frontier conditions.

I first saw Mr. Lincoln when he stepped off his car for a few minutes at Peekskill, while on hi~ way to Washington for his inauguration. He was cheerful land light-hearted, though he traveled through crowds, many of whom were enemies, part of the time in secret and all the time in danger of assassination. I met him frequently three years afterward when care, anxiety and long-continued overwork had made him look prematurely aged.

I was one of the committee in charge of the funeral train which was bearing his body to his home while on its way through the state of New York. The hostile hosts of four years before were now standing about the roadway with bared heads, weeping. As we sped over the rails at night the scene was the most pathetic ever witnessed. At every crossroads the glare of innumerable torches illumined the whole population, from age to infancy, kneeling on the ground and their clergy­men leading in prayers and hymns. The casket was placed in the Capitol at Albany that we all might have a farewell look at the great President. The youthful confidence of my first view was gone, also the troubled and worn look of the closing years of his labors, but  there rested upon the pallid face and noble brow an expression in death of serenity, peace and happiness.

We are celebrating within a few months of each other the tercentenary of Milton and the centenaries of Poe and Darwin. Our current literature of the daily, weekly and monthly press is full of eulogy of the Puritan poet, of his influence upon English literature and the English language, and of his immortal work, "Paradise Lost." There are not in this vast audience twenty people who have read "Paradise Lost," while there is scarcely a man, woman, or child in the United States who has not read Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg. Few gathered to pay tribute to that remarkable genius, Edgar Allan Poe, and yet in every schoolhouse in the

.land today the children are reciting or hearing read extracts from the address of Lincoln. Darwin carved out a new era in scientific research and established the truth of one of the most beneficent principles for the progress and growth of the world. Yet Darwin's fame and achievements are for the select few in th~ higher realms of liberal learning. But for Lincoln the acclaim goes up today to him as one of the few foremost men of all the ages, from statesmen and men of letters of every land, from the halls of Congress and of the legis­latures, from the seats of justice, from colleges and uni­versities, and. above and beyond all, from the homes of the plain people of the United States.

Chauncey Depew.