38, is a musical composition for chorus and orchestra written by English composer Gustav Holst (1874–1934) in 1919.
It is a setting of a passage from Walt Whitman's 1865 elegy When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, which was written to mourn the death of American president Abraham Lincoln.
Holst saw Whitman "as a New World prophet of tolerance and internationalism as well as a new breed of mystic whose transcendentalism offered an antidote to encrusted Victorianism."
"[1] In the Ode to Death, the quiet, resigned mood is seen by Matthews as an "abrupt volte-face" after the life-enhancing spirituality of the Hymn.
[3] According to fellow composers Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ernest Walker it is considered by many to be Holst's most beautiful choral work.