Strange, (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, agonies, blood,
even assassination, should so condense--perhaps only really, lastingly
condense--a Nationality.
I repeat it--the grand deaths of the race--the dramatic deaths of
every nationality--are its most important inheritance-value--in some
respects beyond its literature and art--(as the hero is beyond his
finest portrait, and the battle itself beyond its choicest song or
epic.) Is not here indeed the point underlying all tragedy? the famous
pieces of the Grecian masters--and all masters? Why, if the old Greeks
had had this man, what trilogies of plays--what epics--would have been
made out of him! How the rhapsodes would have recited him! How quickly
that quaint tall form would have enter'd into the region where men
vitalize gods, and gods divinify men! But Lincoln, his times, his
death--great as any, any age--belong altogether to our own, and our
autochthonic. (Sometimes indeed I think our American days, our own
stage--the actors we know and have shaken hands, or talk'd with--more
fateful than anything in Eschylus--more heroic than the fighters
around Troy--afford kings of men for our Democracy prouder than
Agamemnon--models of character cute and hardy as Ulysses--deaths more
pitiful than Priam's.)
When, centuries hence, (as it must, in my opinion, be centuries hence
before the life of these States, or of Democracy, can be really
written and illustrated,) the leading historians and dramatists seek
for some personage, some special event, incisive enough to mark with
deepest cut, and mnemonize, this turbulent Nineteenth century of
ours, (not only these States, but all over the political and social
world)--something, perhaps, to close that gorgeous procession of
European feudalism, with all its pomp and caste-prejudices, (of whose
long train we in America are yet so inextricably the heirs)--something
to identify with terrible identification, by far the greatest
revolutionary step in the history of the United States, (perhaps the
greatest of the world, our century)--the absolute extirpation and
erasure of slavery from the States--those historians will seek in vain
for any point to serve more thoroughly their purpose, than Abraham
Lincoln's death.
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