w eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! Heart! Heart!
Leave you not the little spot,
Where on the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O captain. My captain. Rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores
a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
O captain. Dear father.
This arm I push beneath you;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.

My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor win:
But the ship, the ship is anchor'd safe, its voyage closed and
done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won:
Exult O shores, and ring, O bells.
But I with silent tread,
Walk the spot the captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
--Walt Whitman.

As Washington stands to the Revolution and the establishment of the
government, so Lincoln stands as the hero of the mightier struggle
by which our Union was saved. He was born in 1809, ten years after
Washington, his work done had been laid to rest at Mount Vernon. No
great man ever came from beginnings which seemed to promise so little.
Lincoln's family, for more than one generation, had been sinking,
instead of rising, in the social scale. His father was one of those
men who were found on the frontier in the early days of the western
movement, always changing from one place to another, and dropping a
little lower at each remove. Abraham Lincoln was born into a family
who were not only poor, but shiftless, and his early days were days
of ignorance, and poverty, and hard work. Out of such inauspicious
surroundings, he slowly and painfully lifted himself. He gave himself
an education, he took part in an Indian war, he worked in the fields,
he kept a country store, he read and studied, and, at last, he became
a lawyer. Then he entered into the rough politics of the newly-settled
State. He grew to be a leader in his county, and went to the
legislature. The road was very rough, the struggle was very hard and
very bitter, but the movement was always upward.

At last he was elected to Congress, and served one term in Washington
as a Whig with credit, but without distinction. Then he went back to h