Abraham Lincoln

“He was Fond of Reading Aloud.”

Posted on May 31, 2016 Updated on May 8, 2018

Where only one or two were present he was fond of reading aloud. He passed many of the summer evenings in this way when occupying his cottage at the Soldiers’ Home. He would there read Shakspere for hours with a single secretary for audience. The plays he most affected were “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and the series of Histories ; among these he never tired of “ Richard the Second.” The terrible outburst of grief and despair into which Richard falls in the third act had a peculiar fascination for him. I have heard him read it at Springfield, at the White House, and at the Soldiers’ Home.

Far heaven’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings : –

How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered : – For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court ; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp, –
Allowing him a breath, a little scene
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit, –

As if this flesh, which walls about our life,

Were brass impregnable, – and humored thus,

Comes at the last, and with a little pin

Bores through his castle walls and – farewell, King!

He read Shakspere more than all other writers together. He made no attempt to keep pace with the ordinary literature of the day. Sometimes he read a scientific work with keen appreciation, but he pursued no systematic course. He owed less to reading than most men.

He delighted in Burns ; he said one day after reading those exquisite lines to Glencairn, beginning, “ The bridegroom may forget the bride,” that “ Burns never touched a sentiment without carrying it to its ultimate expression and leaving nothing further to be said.”

Of Thomas Hood he was also excessively fond. He often read aloud “ The Haunted House.” He would go to bed with a volume of Hood in his hands, and would sometimes rise at midnight and traversing the long halls of the Executive Mansion in his night clothes would come to his secretary’s room and read aloud something that especially pleased him. He wanted to share his enjoyment of the writer ; it was dull pleasure to him to laugh alone. He read Bryant and Whittier with appreciation ; there were many poems of Holmes’s that he read with intense relish. “ The Last Leaf” was one of his favorites ; he knew it by heart, and used often to repeat with deep feeling:

The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has pressed
In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear

Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb;

Quoted in “Life in the White House in the time of Lincoln” by John Hay