A sense of some impending tragedy seems to have accompanied Whitman upon his walks at the time of the assassination. It was early spring and the lilac was in blossom; a strange association, deeper than mere fancy,[437] seemed to the poet to establish itself between the scent of the lilac, the solitary night-song of the hermit-thrush, the fulness of the evening star at this time, and the passing of "the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands". It was out of this deeply realised association that he built up the mystical symphony which he afterwards called "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn," a poem in many respects similar to his other great chant of death, "Out of the Cradle". Mystical and symbolic, it is charged with a vast national emotion; and this gives a certain vagueness to its solemnity, better befitting its theme than a more concrete treatment. The poet was not writing of "him I love," but rather attempting to express the feeling of lonely loss which thousands experienced on that dark April day. Hence his poem is the hymn of a nation's bereavement rather than the elegy of a great man dead. Whitman, in his attitude toward Lincoln, had come to regard him as an incarnation of America. He thought of him as he thought of the Flag; and his personal reverence for the man took almost the form of devotion to an ideal. * * * * * The President's death had been already noted in _Drum-taps_, but when he conceived the longer poem, Whitman seems to have recalled the edition,[438] in order to add this and certain other verses as a sequel, thus delaying its publication till about the end of the year. Another of the new poems calls for a word in passing. "Chanting the Square Deific"[439] is an attempt to express his theory of ultimate reality, that is to say, of the soul. Four elements go to the making of this, and these he calls respectively, Jehovah, Christ, Satan and Santa Spirita--adopting, as he sometimes would, a formula of his own inventing, that was of no known language. In other words, he conceived of the soul's reality,[440] as characterised by four essential qualities; first, its obedience to the remorseless general laws of being; second, its capacity for attraction to and absorption into others--its love-quality; third, its lawless defiance of everything but its own will; fourth, its sense of identity with the whole. Condemnation, compassion, defiance, harmony, these he says are final and essential qualities of the Divine; only as they are united can our idea of God or of the Soul, which is the Son of God, be complete. In the traditional Satan of revolt and pride, he saw an element without which the harmony was immaterial and unreal. Evil and perilous in itself, in its relation to the rest it is the solid ballast of the soaring soul. In this, he suggests much of the attitude which Nietzsche was afterwards to make his own. * * * * *