From "My Childhood Home I See Again"
But here's an object more of dread
Than ought the grave contains--
A human form with reason fled,
While wretched life remains.
A fortune-favored child--
Now locked for aye, in mental night,
A haggard mad-man wild.
When first, with maddened will,
Yourself you maimed, your father fought,
And mother strove to kill;
Your dange'rous strength to bind;
And soon, a howling crazy man
Your limbs were fast confined.
Your bones and sinews bared;
And fiendish on the gazing crowd,
With burning eye-balls glared--
With maniac laught[ter?] joined--
How fearful were those signs displayed
By pangs that killed thy mind!
Time smoothed thy fiercer woes,
How plaintively thy mournful song
Upon the still night rose.
Far distant, sweet, and lone--
The funeral dirge, it ever seemed
Of reason dead and gone.
All stealthily and still,
Ere yet the rising God of day
Had streaked the Eastern hill.
Seemed sorrowing angels round,
Whose swelling tears in dew-drops fell
Upon the listening ground.
That raised thee o'er the brute.
Thy piercing shrieks, and soothing strains,
Are like, forever mute.
Than subject now of woe.
All mental pangs, by time's kind laws,
Hast lost the power to know.
That keepst the world in fear;
Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence,
And leave him ling'ring here?
-- Abraham Lincoln (1846)
Our sixteenth president was born today in 1809 in a log cabin in a backwoods county in Kentucky.










