Admiral John Dahlgren, Personal Book of Poems from which Abraham Lincoln Read Aloud, May 1863 

Halleck, Fitz-Green. Alnwick Castle, With Other Poems. New York: George Dearborn, 1836. 8vo, pressed buckram boards with gilt design, 98pp. Front pastedown with nameplate MVD, for Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, the wife of Rear Admiral John Dahlgren, and inked on page 19 (the fourth of six pages of the poem "Marco Bozzaris"), From this book President Lincoln read aloud this and other poems on the evenings of May 22nd and May 23rd, 1863.

Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren compiled her late husband's memoirs in 1882, Memoir of John A. Dahlgren (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.), which contains on page 368 an the entry for May 22, 1863: I received a telegram from Secretary of War for a boat in the evening.  So about nine came a carriage with Stanton and, to my surprise, the President, bound on a quiet trip to Acquia. He left so privately that Mrs. Lincoln alone knew it. I told them there was nothing to eat in the steamboat. I had eatables, bedding, &c., tumbled in, and we left at ten PM, after supper. The President read aloud to us from Halleck's poems1, and then we went to impromptu beds.  

Madeleine's footnote reads: President Lincoln had real dramatic power as a reader, and recited poetic passages with pathos. The copy of Halleck from which the President read on this occasion, now belongs to us, and "Marco Bozzaris" is marked as the piece read aloud to Secretary Stanton and Admiral Dahlgren. What a mournful and prophetic suggestiveness there was in the selection! How truly may it now be said of Lincoln,

"For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's;
One of the few, the immortal names,
That were not born to die.

Provenance: Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren to Charles Bunker Dahlgren; obtained from sale of the latter's summer home in Rye, NY

Light shelf wear and fading of the spine, else very good.