XXXVII.  FATE INTERPOSES

There was an early spring on the Potomac in 1865.  While April was still young, the Judas trees became spheres of purply, pinkish bloom.  The Washington parks grew softly bright as the lilacs opened.  Pendulous willows veiled with green laces afloat in air the changing brown that was winter’s final shadow; in the Virginia woods the white blossoms of the dogwood seemed to float and flicker among the windy trees like enormous flocks of alighting butterflies.  And over head such a glitter of turquoise blue!  As lovely in a different way as on that fateful Sun-day morning when Russell drove through the same woods toward Bull Run so long, long ago.  Such was the background of the last few days of Lincoln’s life.

Though tranquil, his thoughts dwelt much on death.  While at City Point, he drove one day with Mrs. Lincoln along the banks of the James.  They passed a country graveyard.  “It was a retired place,” said Mrs. Lincoln long afterward, “shaded by trees, and early spring flowers were opening on nearly every grave.  It was so quiet and attractive that we stopped the carriage and walked through it.  Mr. Lincoln seemed thoughtful and impressed.  He said:  ’Mary, you are younger than I; you will survive me.  When I am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.’"(1)

His mood underwent a mysterious change.  It was serene and yet charged with a peculiar grave loftiness not quite like any phase of him his friends had known hitherto.  As always, his thoughts turned for their reflection to Shakespeare.  Sumner who was one of the party at City Point, was deeply impressed by his reading aloud, a few days before his death, that passage in Macbeth which describes the ultimate security of Duncan where nothing evil “can touch him farther."(2)

There was something a little startling, as if it were not quite of this world, in the tender lightness that seemed to come into his heart.  “His whole appearance, poise and bearing,” says one of his observers, “had marvelously changed.  He was, in fact, transfigured.  That indescribable sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of his very being, had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been achieved."(3)

It was as if the seer in the trance had finally passed beyond his trance; and had faced smiling toward his earthly comrades, imagining he was to return to them; unaware that somehow his emergence was not in the ordinary course of nature; that in it was an accent of the inexplicable, something which the others caught and at which they trembled; though they knew not why.  And he, so beautifully at peace, and yet thrilled as never before by the vision of the murdered Duncan at the end of life’s fitful fever—­what was his real feeling, his real vision of himself?  Was it something of what the great modern poet strove so bravely to express—­