The Roving Critic by Carl Van Doren — Read

THE POETICAL CULT OF LINCOLN

When Secretary Stanton at the bedside of Lincoln declared that the dead man now belonged to the ages, he had a vision which was probably not without melodrama, not without the large pomp and plumage which went in the sixties with the expectation of renown. He must have seen rows of ample bronze statues in innumerable parks, where togaed or equestrian Lincolns would look blandly down, mindful of the dignity of history, upon a reverent people hushed in part by the very weight of the metal which commemorated the great man. It is after all too much to have hoped from Stanton that he could foresee how familiar fame would be with Lincoln, how colloquially it would treat him on the one hand, and on the other how quickly it would make him out not an iron demigod, or a wooden hero, but a friendly saint, an immanent presence, a continual comforter. Richard Henry Stoddard, in his _Horation Ode_ written almost at the first news, was not even sure that Lincoln was great: he saw in him a curious epitome of the people, a genius who had risen from them yet safely stood above their variable antipathies and affections. A consciousness of class sounds also in Lowell's more impassioned lines, though the _Commemoration Ode_ perceives the nation not as divided within itself into grades and ranks but as united upon a common ground of simple humanity against the ingenuities and insubstantialities of feudal caste. It remained for Whitman to disregard all thought of Lincoln's modest origins and to utter, without argument or doctrine, the intimate grief of the great American poet of the age for the great American leader, the cautious-handed, gentle, plain, just, resolute, the sweetest, wisest soul, the natural captain who had brought in the victor ship from her fearful voyage.