let us remember that:

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

AN HORATIAN ODE[21]

BY RICHARD HENRY STODDARD

Not as when some great captain falls
In battle, where his country calls,
Beyond the struggling lines
That push his dread designs

To doom, by some stray ball struck dead:
Or in the last charge, at the head
Of his determined men,
Who must be victors then!

Nor as when sink the civic great,
The safer pillars of the State,
Whose calm, mature, wise words
Suppress the need of swords!--

With no such tears as e'er were shed
Above the noblest of our dead
Do we to-day deplore
The man that is no more!

Our sorrow hath a wider scope,
Too strange for fear, too vast for hope,--
A wonder, blind and dumb,
That waits--what is to come!

Not more astonished had we been
If madness, that dark night, unseen,
Had in our chambers crept,
And murdered while we slept!

We woke to find a mourning earth--
Our Lares shivered on the hearth,--
To roof-tree fallen,--all
That could affright, appall!

Such thunderbolts, in other lands,
Have smitten the rod from royal hands,
But spared, with us, till now,
Each laurelled Caesar's brow!

No Caesar he, whom we lament,
A man without a precedent,
Sent it would seem, to do
His work--and perish too!

Not by the weary cares of state,
The endless tasks, which will not wait,
Which, often done in vain,
Must yet be done again:

Not in the dark, wild tide of war,
Which rose so high, and rolled so far,
Sweeping from sea to sea
In awful anarchy:--

Four fateful years of mortal strife,
Which slowly drained the nation's life,
(Yet, for each drop that ran
There sprang an armed man!)

Not then;--but when by measures meet,--
By victory, and by defeat,--
By courage, patience, skill,
The people's fixed "We will!"

Had pierced, had crushed rebellion dead,--
Without a hand, without a head:--
At last, when all was well,
He fell--O, how he fell!

The time