Papers Of Abraham Lincoln

“My Childhood-Home I See Again,” [25 February 1846] 1

Mr. Editor: The following verses were written by a friend of mine, on re-visiting, after an absence of twenty years, the home of his infancy and boyhood, and the burial place of his mother and his only sister. In communicating them to me, he says: “That part of the country is, in itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth: but still the sight of it, with its inhabitants and its natural objects, aroused feelings in me, which were certainly poetic. Whether my expression of those feelings is poetic, is quite another question.” I think this question may be safely decided in his favor, and having procured his permission to publish them—are willing to hear the verdict of your readers.

The subject of the second part was a schoolmate of the author—the son of the rich man of the little neighborhood; “at the age of nineteen,” says my friend, “he unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity. When I visited my old home in the fall of 1844, I found him still lingering in this wretched condition.”

THE RETURN.

PART I.—REFLECTION.

My childhood’s home I see again,
And sadden with the view;

And still, as memories crowd my brain,
There’s pleasure in it too.
Oh! memory—thou mid-way world
’Twixt earth and Paradise,

Where things decayed, and loved ones lost,
In dreamy shadows rise;
And freed from all that’s earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure and bright;

Like scenes in some enchanted isle,
All bathed in liquid light.

As dusky mountains please the eye,
When twilight chases day—

As bugle notes, that pass us by,
In distance die away—
As, leaving some grand water-fall,
We lingering list its roar—

So memory will hallow all
We’ve known—but know no more.
Now twenty years have passed away,
Since here I bade farewell

To woods, and fields, and scenes of play,
And play-mates loved so well.
Where many were, how few remain,
Of old, familiar things;

But seeing these, to mind again
The [lost and absent] brings.
[The friends I left that parting day—]
Have changed, as time has sped!

Young childhood grown! strong manhood gray
And half of all are dead!
I hear the lone survivors tell,
How naught from death could save;

Till every sound appeared a knell,
And every spot a grave.
I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms;

And feel—companion of the dead—
I’m living in their tombs.

PART II—THE MANIAC.

But here’s an object more of dread;
Than aught the grave contains:

A human form, with reason fled,
While wretched life remains.
Poor Matthew! one of genius bright,
A fortune-favored child;

Now locked for aye in mental night
A haggard madman wild!
Poor Matthew! I have ne’er forgot
When first with madden’d will,

Yourself you maimed—your father fought,
And mother strove to kill.
When terror spread, and neighbors ran,
Your dangerous strength to bind:

And soon—a howling crazy man—
Yours limbs were fast confined.
How then you strove and shrieked aloud—
Your bones and sinews bared—

And fiendish on the gazing crowd
With burning eyeballs glared!
And begged, and swore, and wept and pray’d
And maniac laughter joined—

How fearful were those signs disp’ayed
Of pangs that killed thy mind.
And when at length, though drear and long,
Time soothed thy fiercer woes,

How plaintively thy mournful song
Upon the still night rose.
I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed—
Far distant, sweet and lone:

The funeral dirge, it ever seemed,
Of reason dead and gone.
To drink its strains, I’ve stolen away
All stealthily and still;

Ere yet the rising God of day
Had streaked the eastern hill.
Air held his breath—trees with the spell,
Seemed sorrowing angels round

Whose swelling tears in dew-drops fell
Upon the listening ground.
But this is past—and nought remains,
That raised thee o’er the brute;

Thy piercing shrieks, and soothing strains,
Are both forever mute.
Then fare-thee well! more thou the cause
Than subject, now of woe:

All mortal pangs, by time’s kind laws,
Hast lost the power to know.
Oh death! thou awe-inspiring prince,
That keep’st the world in fear,

Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence,
And leave him lingering here?

1The date of this poem written by Abraham Lincoln is unknown. The editors have dated it the day following his letter to Andrew Johnston on February 24, in which Lincoln stated that his poem consisting of four cantos was “almost done.” This version was published anonymously in the May 5, 1847 Quincy Whig.