Presidential Poetry

On this, Abraham Lincoln's (1809-1865) birthday, the first part of one of his poems. It is said he was a melancholy man, and his poems certainly bear witness to that fact. from Poem-A-Day.com:

My Childhood Home I See Again

My childhood home I see again,
   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.