Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 1 [1824-Aug. 28, 1848].

To Andrew Johnston1Jump to section

Tremont, April 18, 1846.

Friend Johnston: Your letter, written some six weeks since,2Jump to section was received in due course, and also the paper with the parody. It is true, as suggested it might be, that I have never seen Poe's ``Raven'';3Jump to section and I very well know that a parody is almost entirely dependent for its interest upon the reader's acquaintance with the original. Still there is enough in the polecat, self-considered, to afford one several hearty laughs. I think four or five of the last stanzas are decidedly funny, particularly where Jeremiah ``scrubbed and washed, and prayed and fasted.''

I have not your letter now before me; but, from memory, I

think you ask me who is the author of the piece I sent you,4Jump to section and that you do so ask as to indicate a slight suspicion that I myself am the author. Beyond all question, I am not the author. I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is. Neither do I know who is the author. I met it in a straggling form in a newspaper last summer, and I remember to have seen it once before, about fifteen years ago, and this is all I know about it. The piece of poetry of my own which I alluded to, I was led to write under the following circumstances. In the fall of 1844, thinking I might aid some to carry the State of Indiana for Mr. Clay, I went into the neighborhood in that State in which I was raised,5Jump to section where my mother and only sister were buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen years. That part of the country is, within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth; but still, seeing it and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry; though whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question. When I got to writing, the change of subjects divided the thing into four little divisions or cantos, the first only of which I send you now and may send the others hereafter. Yours truly,

A. LINCOLN.

My childhood's home I see again,6Jump to section

And sadden with the view;

And still, as memory crowds my brain,

There's pleasure in it too.

O Memory! thou midway 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, passing by,

In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall,

We, lingering, list its roar---

So memory will hallow all

We've known, but know no more.

Near twenty years have passed away

Since here I bid farewell

To woods and fields, and scenes of play,

And playmates loved so well.

Where many were, but few remain

Of old familiar things;

But seeing them, to mind again

The lost and absent brings.

The friends I left that parting day,

How changed, as time has sped!

Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray,

And half of all are dead.

I hear the loved survivors tell

How nought from death could save,

Till every sound appears 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 the tombs.

Annotation

[1]   NH, I, 288-92.

keyboard_returnReturn

[2]   The parody entitled ``The Pole-Cat'' did not appear in the Quincy Whig until March 18, 1846. Hence Lincoln's estimate of ``six weeks'' is somewhat inaccurate.

keyboard_returnReturn

[3]   ``The Raven'' was first published in N. P. Willis' Evening Mirror, January, 1845. Later Lincoln read and memorized the poem.

keyboard_returnReturn

[4]   See Lincoln's letter to Johnston, February 24, 1846. The poem was ``Mortality'' by William Knox.

keyboard_returnReturn

[5]   Now Spencer County, then Perry County, Indiana.

keyboard_returnReturn

[6]   In the absence of the original manuscript of this canto which was enclosed with the letter to Johnston, it is impossible to know which variations from the complete manuscript are Lincoln's emendations. The version sent to Johnston seems, however, to be a revision of the first canto as preserved in the complete manuscript printed supra (February 25? 1846). A second canto was sent in Lincoln's letter of September 6, 1846. Both cantos were published in the Quincy Whig, May 5, 1847. See letter of February 25, 1847, infra.

keyboard_returnReturn