Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Indiana's Contribution to Abraham Lincoln: Address Delivered by Dr. Louis A. Warren on His Installation as an Honorary Companion of Indiana Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States at Foster Hall in Indianapolis on Thursday, September 28, 1944
Whose swelling tears in dewdrops fell Upon the listening ground.
This reaction of a sixteen year old boy, who for the next five years lived under the spell of this tragedy, and found something in the Mournful Song that drew him from his bed before day break to drink its strains, is of far more importance than an attempt to trace the origin of Lincoln's melancholy to an alleged discovery of some skeleton in the Lincoln family closet, which is supposed to have worried Lincoln all his life; or, the purely fictitious narrative about Lincoln's collapse at the time of Ann Rutledge's death.
The tragedy of this boyhood playmate prefaced by the death of his own mother, whose grave he could see each morning as he came from the cabin door, and supplemented by the death in childbirth of his only sister, might have been responsible for In diana's sending into Illinois, in 1830, a melancholy man.
The blending of melancholy and mirth seems to have been a peculiar lifelong practice of Lincoln and the last division of his long poem, inspired by his visit to his old Indiana home, as he stated is in lighter vein. He chose for the subject of this last canto, A Bear Hunt.
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