he procession at the City Hall at
least twenty thousand persons were assembled in the immediate
neighborhood. While awaiting the arrival of the procession a number of
German singing bands were marched into the open space before the Hall,
and arranged on either side of the entrance, preparatory to the
singing of a requiem to the dead. The procession entered the Park at
about half-past eleven o'clock, and the hearse stopped before the
entrance to the Hall. Here the coffin was immediately taken from the
hearse and carried up the stairs to the catafalque which had been
prepared for its reception, while the singing societies rendered two
very appropriate dirges.

The interior of the City Hall had been decorated with much taste.
Across the dome a black curtain was drawn, and the rays of light thus
conducted fell subdued upon the sad but imposing spectacle.

Henry T. Tuckerman, a member of the Committee on Resolutions, wrote
the following ode for the funeral obsequies, on the 25th day of April,
1865, at New York City. The Athenaeum Club participated, bearing an
appropriate banner, the members wearing distinctive badges of mourning
and under the leadership of their Vice-President, Henry E. Pierpont;
the President, William T. Blodgett, being at that time absent acting
as Chairman of the Citizens Committee:

ODE

Shroud the banner! rear the cross!
Consecrate a nation's loss;
Gaze on that majestic sleep;
Stand beside the bier to weep;
Lay the gentle son of toil
Proudly in his native soil;
Crowned with honor, to his rest
Bear the prophet of the West.

How cold the brow that yet doth wear
The impress of a nation's care;
How still the heart, whose every beat
Glowed with compassion's sacred heat;
Rigid the lips, whose patient smile
Duty's stern task would oft beguile;
Blood-quenched the pensive eye's soft light;
Nerveless the hand so loth to smite;
So meek in rule, it leads, though dead,
The people as in life it led.

O let his wise and guileless sway
Win every recreant today,
And sorrow's vast and holy wave
Blend all our hearts around hi