“And yet Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set,
     And blew:  Childe Roland to the dark tower came.”

Shortly before the end, he had a strange dream.  Though he spoke of it almost with levity, it would not leave his thoughts.  He dreamed he was wandering through the White House at night; all the rooms were brilliantly lighted; but they were empty.  However, through that unreal solitude floated a sound of weeping.  When he came to the East Room, it was explained; there was a catafalque, the pomp of a military funeral, crowds of people in tears; and a voice said to him, “The President has been assassinated.”

He told this dream to Lamon and to Mrs. Lincoln.  He added that after it had occurred, “the first time I opened the Bible, strange as it may appear, it was at the twenty-eighth chapter of Genesis which relates the wonderful dream Jacob had.  I turned to other passages and seemed to encounter a dream or a vision wherever I looked.  I kept on turning the leaves of the Old Book, and everywhere my eye fell upon passages recording matters strangely in keeping with my own thoughts—­supernatural visitations, dreams, visions, etc.”

But when Lamon seized upon this as text for his recurrent sermon on precautions against assassination, Lincoln turned the matter into a joke.  He did not appear to interpret the dream as foreshadowing his own death.  He called Lamon’s alarm “downright foolishness."(4)

Another dream in the last night of his life was a consolation.  He narrated it to the Cabinet when they met on April fourteenth, which happened to be Good Friday.  There was some anxiety with regard to Sherman’s movements in North Carolina.  Lincoln bade the Cabinet set their minds at rest.  His dream of the night before was one that he had often had.  It was a presage of great events.  In this dream he saw himself “in a singular and indescribable vessel, but always the same... moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore.”  This dream had preceded all the great events of the war.  He believed it was a good omen.(5)

At this last Cabinet meeting, he talked freely of the one matter which in his mind overshadowed all others.  He urged his Ministers to put aside all thoughts of hatred and revenge.  “He hoped there would be no persecution, no bloody work, after the war was over.  None need expect him to take any part in hanging or killing these men, even the worst of them.  ’Frighten them out of the country, let down the bars, scare them off,’ said he, throwing up his hands as if scaring sheep.  Enough lives have been sacrificed.  We must extinguish our resentment if we expect harmony and union.  There was too much desire on the part of our very good friends to be masters, to interfere and dictate to those States, to treat the people not as fellow citizens; there was too little respect for their rights.  He didn’t sympathize in these feelings."(6)