Since our talk at Christiana I have read
All you referred me to concerning Lincoln:
His speeches and the story of the struggle
Which ended in your war, not civil really
But waged between two nations—but no matter!
To me whose life is closing, and whose life
Was spent in struggle, much of misery,
In friendship with De Tocqueville then at odds
With him and his philosophy, who knew
Bismarck, who saw the wars of Europe, saw
Great men come up and fall, and systems change,
Who probed into the Renaissance and mastered
Religions and philosophies and wrote
Concerning racial inequalities—
To me I say this crisis of your time
And country seems remote as it might be
Almost in far Australia, trivial
In substance and effect, or world result.
And now your letter and these documents
Concerning Douglas yield but scanty gold.
Perhaps I’ve reached an age where I cannot
Digest new matter, or resolve its worth,
Extract its bearing and significance.
But since you ask me I am writing you
What I’ve arrived at.

From the photographs
And the descriptions of your Illinois,
Where Lincoln spent his youth, I almost sicken:
Small muddy rivers flanked by bottom lands
So fat of fertile stuff the grossest weeds
Thrive thriftier than in Egypt, round their roots
Repulsive serpents crawl, the air is full
Of loathsome insects, and along these banks
An agued people live who have no life
Except hard toil, whose pleasures are the dance
Where violent liquor takes the gun or knife;
Who have no inspiration save the orgy
Of the religious meeting, where the cult
Of savage dreams is almost theirs. The towns
Places of filth, of maddening quietude;
Streets mired with mud, board sidewalks where the men,
Like chickens with the cholera, stand and squeak
Foul or half-idiot things; near by the churches,
Mere arch-ways to the grave-yard. Nothing here
Of conscious plan to lift the spirit up.
All is defeat of liberty in spite
Of certain strong men, certain splendid breeds,
The pioneers who made your state; no beauty
Save as a soul delves in a master book.
And out of this your Lincoln came, not poor
As Burns was in a land of storied towers,
But poor as a degenerate breed is poor
Sunk down in squalor.

Yet he seems a man
Of master qualities. The muddy streets,
And melancholy of a pastoral town,
And sights of people sick, the stifling weeds
Which grew about him left his spirit clean,
Save for an ache that all his youth was spent
In such surroundings.

And observe the man!
Do poverty and life among such people
Make him a libertarian? Let us see.
At twenty years he is a centralist,
Stands for the bank which Andrew Jackson fought,
And lauds protection, thinks of Washington
Much more than Springfield. That is right I say—
But call him not a democrat.

Look here!
This master book of Stephens which you sent me
Accuses Lincoln of imperial deeds,
And breach of laws, and rightly so, in truth.
That makes me love him, but the end he sought
Is something else. At first that was the Union,
Straight through it was the Union, but at last
The strain of Christian softness always his
Which filled him full of hate for slavery
Cropped out in freedom for your negro slaves,
Which was an act of war, and so confessed,
Not propped by law, but only by a will.
Thus he became a man who broke all law
To have his law. He killed a million men
For what he called the Union, what he thought
Was truth of Christian brotherhood. I say
He killed a million men, for it is true
Your war had never come, had he believed
All government must rest in men’s consent.
What have we but a soul imperial?
A brother to me, standing for the strong,
For master races, blindly at the work
Of biologic mount? The cells of him
That make him saint for radicals and dreamers
Are but somatic, but the sperm of him
Will propagate great rulers.

See his face!
Its tragic pathos fools the idealist—
But study it. First, then, observe the eyes,
And tell me how within their gaze events
Or men could lose their true proportions! Here
No visions swarm, no dreams with flashing wings
Throw light upon them. No, they only look
Across a boundless prairie, that is all.
And in that brow and nose we see a strength
Slow, steady, wary, cautious—why this man
Is your conservative, perhaps your best,
Which is one reason why he loved the Union,
And even said at last that government
Of the people meant the Union—how absurd!—
Would perish, if it perished, clearly false!
And if ’twere true would be the better. Read
My Renaissance, and other books, you’ll see
How I’d protect the master spirits, keep
The master races pure; how I detest
The brotherhood of man, how I have shown
The falseness of these Galilean dreams,
These syrups strained in secret, used to drug
The strong and make them equal with the weak.
Such things are of the mind which weaves in space,—
A penalty of thought. Come back to earth,
Live close to nature. Do not sap a rose
To nourish cabbages, and call it truth!