Lowell struck this note tentatively when he spoke of the sweet clay from the West out of which nature had chosen to fashion the new hero who should be less a lonely mountain-peak than a broad, genial, friendly prairie. Edwin Markham more fully analyzed him: the tried clay of the common road, warmed by the earth, and dashed through with prophecy and laughter; the colour and tang and odour of primal substances, with a dozen virtues caught from external nature. This rhetoric John Gould Fletcher translates into a subtler language in his massive image of Lincoln as a gaunt, scraggly pine which has its roots so deep down in the very foundations of human life, in the old unshakable wisdom and knowledge and goodness and happiness, that wind and weather cannot hurt it and that a nation of men may safely rest in its shade. The image is finely illustrative of a common attitude taken toward Lincoln during the late war, when men constantly turned to him, more by far than most people realized, for words which would quiet their bitter fears and doubts, and for instructions how to act in a time so nearly parallel to his. He was the symbol and seal of American unity; he was the American proof that greatness may emerge from the people; he was the American evidence that supreme nobility may come very close to normal love and comprehension. Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln’s own Springfield, gave true voice to this feeling in the poem which speaks of Lincoln as so stirred even in death by the horrors which alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down through the midnight streets, mourning and brooding over the violent dangers as in the days when he himself bore the burden of a similar, however smaller, strife. It is precisely thus, in less critical ages, that saints are said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the waves or turn the arrow aside. These more vulgar manifestations Mr. Lindsay naturally did not use. Lincoln as he walks at midnight is only the desire of living hearts realized, the apparition for a moment in its bodily vesture of a spirit too precious ever to have become merely a memory. He lives as the father of every cult lives, in the echoes of his voice on many tongues and the vibrations of his presence in many hearts. For poetry such a cult offers an enormous future as yet only just suspected. Our poets have a folk-hero who to the common folk-virtues of shrewdness and kindness adds essential wit and eloquence and loftiness of soul. Perhaps the disposition just now to purge him of all rankness and to make him out a saint and mystic may not last for ever, but obviously it is a step in his poetical history analogous to those steps which ennobled Charlemagne and Arthur and canonized Joan of Arc. WHITMAN IN HIS CRISES