Honoring Abraham Lincoln - 12 February

Photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken in Chicago by William Shaw in 1859

In the spirit of portraiture, we look into Abraham Lincoln's soul when we read his favorite poem, Mortality, by William Knox. As described by John Miller in the Wall Street Journal, Lincoln's mother died during his childhood and his most beloved were taken from him by their premature deaths, he must have found the verse consoling.
Knox's poem is at best a "simple emotional tonic,"  but the lines below resonate with the wisdom of David Lochman, another Springfield, Illinois native, as well as ideas in Annie Dillard's in For The Time Being. 

O why should the spirit of mortal be proud!...

...The leaves of the oak and the willows shall fade,

Be scattered around, and together be laid;

And the young and the old, and the low and the high,

Shall moulder to dust, and together shall lie...

...For we are the same things that our fathers have been,

....The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think,

From the death we are shrinking from they too would shrink,  

To the life we are clinging to they too would cling --

But it speeds from the earth like a bird on the wing.

They loved -- but their story we cannot unfold;

They scorned -- but the heart of the haughty is cold;

They grieved -- but no wail from their slumbers may come;

They joyed -- but the voice of their gladness is dumb.

They died -- ay, they died! and we, things that are now,

Who walk on the turf that lies over their brow,

Who make in their dwellings a transient abode,

Meet the change they met on their pilgrimage road.

Yea, hope and despondence, and pleasure and pain,

Are mingled together like sunshine and rain;

And the smile and the tear, and the song and the dirge,

Still follow each other like surge upon surge.....