a few days before his
death, that passage in Macbeth which describes the ultimate security of
Duncan where nothing evil "can touch him farther."(2)

There was something a little startling, as if it were not quite of this
world, in the tender lightness that seemed to come into his heart. "His
whole appearance, poise and bearing," says one of his observers, "had
marvelously changed. He was, in fact, transfigured. That indescribable
sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of
his very being, had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable
expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his
life had been achieved."(3)

It was as if the seer in the trance had finally passed beyond his
trance; and had faced smiling toward his earthly comrades, imagining he
was to return to them; unaware that somehow his emergence was not in the
ordinary course of nature; that in it was an accent of the inexplicable,
something which the others caught and at which they trembled; though
they knew not why. And he, so beautifully at peace, and yet thrilled as
never before by the vision of the murdered Duncan at the end of life's
fitful fever--what was his real feeling, his real vision of himself?
Was it something of what the great modern poet strove so bravely to
express--

"And yet Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set,
And blew: Childe Roland to the dark tower came."

Shortly before the end, he had a strange dream. Though he spoke of it
almost with levity, it would not leave his thoughts. He dreamed he
was wandering through the White House at night; all the rooms were
brilliantly lighted; but they were empty. However, through that unreal
solitude floated a sound of weeping. When he came to the East Room, it
was explained; there was a catafalque, the pomp of a military funeral,
crowds of people in tears; and a voice said to him, "The President has
been assassinated."

He told this dream to Lamon and to Mrs. Lincoln. He added that after
it had occurred, "the first time I opened the Bible, strange as it may
appear, it was at the twenty-eighth chapter of Genesis which relates
the wonderful dream Jacob had. I turned to other passages and seemed to
encounter a dream or a vision wherever I looked. I kept on turning
the leaves of the Old Book, and everywhere my eye fell upon
passages recording matters strangely in keeping with my own
thoughts--supernatural visitations, dreams, visions,