Who wrote the lines of poetry "quoted" by Lincoln at the Soldiers' Home?

[David Lockmiller]

(01-25-2016 05:20 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  Thank you very much, David. I did what I think was a pretty thorough search for those words in other works, and I drew a blank. The only logical conclusion I could come up with was as you proposed - that Lincoln himself devised the words.

This doesn't totally preclude the possibility that a poem exists that contains these exact words, but I could not find it. My money is definitely on Lincoln at this point.

I agree with you, Roger. Isn't it wonderful what Google has enabled humans to accomplish? It reminds me of Spock back on the Enterprise asking questions of information within the Galaxy and within recorded time. Ten or fifteen years ago, I would not even have tried to do a research on my Lincoln question.

And, your point about "preclud[ing] the possibility that a poem exists" reminds me of a specific episode of the Gene Roddenberry Star Trek series with Captain Kirk. In this episode, the Enterprise was thrown back in time and ended up in the atmosphere of Earth badly damaged and with only impulse power. The U. S. Air Force sent up fighters to investigate the radar blips. I believe that one of the planes was about to fire upon the damaged Enterprise. Captain Kirk ordered that a tractor beam be placed upon the plane to prevent this. But the plane was too fragile and began to break up. Scotty was able to locate the pilot and beam him over to the Enterprise.

Initially, Kirk was in a quandary as to what to do about the pilot. He had seen the future. Spock did a search and determined that the pilot had accomplished nothing of historical significance in his lifetime and the decision was made to keep him on the Enterprise. This naturally upset the pilot and he fought against the decision.

However, Spock did an additional subsequent search of the pilot's progeny and determined that a son of the pilot born years later made an important historical contribution. The pilot remarked: "I'm going to be a father!" He helped Captain Kirk retrieve the video footage evidence from the pilot's plane of the Enterprise from the Air Force intelligence unit, repairs were made to the Enterprise, the pilot was returned to Earth, the Enterprise raced to the gravitational pull of the Sun, and the Enterprise and crew were catapulted forward to their own time. End of story.

I did not have to do a Google search of the particular Star Trek episode. I used my fallible memory only.