Yet Mrs. Howe's "Battle Hymn," scribbled
hastily in the gray dawn, interpreted, as no other lyric of the
war quite succeeded in interpreting, the mystical glory of
sacrifice for Freedom. Soldiers sang it in camp; women read it
with tears; children repeated it in school, vaguely but truly
perceiving in it, as their fathers had perceived in Webster's
"Reply to Hayne" thirty years before, the idea of union made
"simple, sensuous, passionate." No American poem has had a more
dramatic and intense life in the quick breathing imagination of
men.
More and more, however, the instinct of our people is turning to
the words of Abraham Lincoln as the truest embodiment in
language, as his life was the truest embodiment in action, of our
national ideal. It is a curious reversal of contemporary
judgments that thus discovers in the homely phrases of a frontier
lawyer the most perfect literary expression of the deeper spirit
of his time. "How knoweth this man letters, having never
learned?" asked the critical East. The answer is that he had
learned in a better school than the East afforded.
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