first noticeable issue with his famous rival, on Douglas's bill for "reforming" the judiciary, which was merely a scheme to turn out the judges and appoint others for partisan purposes. It passed the legislature, in spite of the protest of Lincoln and others, but seven years after, Governor Ford, a Democratic leader, said that it was both wrong and impolitic. However, while there are many signs that no absolute gap in his political and legal activities was made by his inner troubles, before or after the fatal first of January, they certainly weighed heavily on his spirit. In the summer Speed asked him for a visit at Louisville, Kentucky, his old home, and Lincoln was much helped by the change. On his return he wrote a letter to Miss Mary Speed, in which occurs this significant passage: "By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky, and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one, at a convenient distance from the others, so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line. In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery, where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One whose offence for which he had been sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually, and the others danced, sang, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' or in other words, that he renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while he permits the best to be nothing better than tolerable. To return to the narrative. When we reached Springfield I stayed but one day, when I started on this tedious circuit where I now am. Do you remember my going to the city, while I was in Kentucky, to have a tooth extracted, and making a failure of it? Well, that same old tooth got to paining me so much that about a week since I had it torn out, bringing with it a bit of the jawbone, the consequence of which is that my mouth is now so sore that I can neither talk nor eat." He was being talked about for governor, but believed it unadvisable to run for the office, as shown in a semi-official announcement in the Sangamon Journal, the editorial columns of which were always open to him: "His talents and services endear him to the Whig party; but we do not believe he desires the nomination. He has already made great sacrifices in maintaining his party principles, and before his political friends asked him to make additional sacrifices, the subject should be well considered. The office for governor, which would of necessity interfere with the practice of his profession, would poorly compensate him for the loss of four of the best years of his life." He therefore kept on with the law, but his mood did not become exactly gay. In February Speed, who had become engaged in the summer, was to be married, and Lincoln's comments are full of light on his own frame of mind. He warns his friend just before the wedding that a period of depression is likely to follow, due first to proable bad weather on the journey, second to "the absence of all business and conversation of friends which might direct his mind and give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare, and turn it to the bitterness of death." It is such thoughts as this that have led to the observation that Lincoln was by temperament a poet of meditation and melancholy. On February 13, he wrote: "If you went through the ceremony calmly or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in any present, you are safe beyond question, and in two or three |