or woe, victory or defeat, life or death, Lincoln was cool and calm, neither despairing nor exulting, praising nor blaming, eulogizing nor condemning. To shout or exult would be flying in the face of fate, or wooing her. So strong was this philosophy that it was a part of his being.1

All this is true as far as it goes; but during his later life, when the Hamlet thinker was forced to be a man of action, there was a spiritual growth in Lincoln which Herndon never fully realized. The pressure upon him of great problems and keen personal sorrows, the awful moral significance of the conflict in which he was the chief combatant, and the overwhelming sense of responsibility which never left him for an hour, contributed, with the natural deepening of soul which life brings, to produce, in a nature profoundly serious and naturally disposed to a spiritual view of life and conduct, a sense of reverent and calm acceptance of the guidance of a Supreme Power. While he never attained to Christian faith, he did come to feel that the Power, which in other years had worn the aspect of a stern if not indifferent fate, was more personal, less pitiless, and more responsive to human appeal.

To sum it up, the work of Mr. Herndon, of which this review is only a sketch, is indispensable to the student who would know his partner and friend. He was a rude workman dealing with raw materials, and there were many refinements in the nature of Lincoln to which he was almost blind, perhaps because he had little in his own makeup to give him the key. None the less, the Lincoln whom he portrayed is a very real person: a man of artless and unstudied simplicity; a lawyer with the heart of a humanitarian; a thinker who picked his way alone; a man of action led by a seer-like vision; a humorist whose heart was full of tears; not free from fault and therefore rich in charity; as unwavering in justice as he was unfailing in mercy. Time, trial, and sorrow were needed to make such. a man, and Lincoln was still growing when he died. It was a far cry from Gentryville to Washington, from the gawky village fabulist and athlete to the patient and heroic man who 1 Ms. letter to Mr. Lindman, Dec., 1886.

presided at the rebirth of a nation; from the "Chronicles of Reuben" to the Gettysburg address. But through the long years, as Herndon watched the unfolding of his life, there was a broadening of mind, a deepening of soul, a chastening of heart, revealing new refinements of nature, until he stood forth a masterpiece of intellect, sympathy, and character.

This long, bony, sad man floated down the Sangamon River in a frail canoe in the spring of 1831. Like a piece of driftwood he lodged at last, without a history, strange, penniless, and alone. In sight of the capital of Illinois, in the fatigue of daily toil, he struggled for the necessaries of life. Thirty years later this same peculiar man left the Sangamon River, backed by friends, by power, by the patriotic prayers of millions of people, to be the ruler of the greatest nation in the world.

CHAPTER XI

The Senior Partner

I

One who follows Lincoln down the years, from a windowless log cabin to the White House, does not find it easy to write about him calmly. He was a man of such high and tender humanity, of personality so appealing and pathos so melting, that almost every study of him ends in a blur of eulogy. No higher tribute could be paid to any man, yet that was just what he did not like, and the reason why, in later years, he refused to read biography. He had no vanity, and being a man of humor he did not pose, nor did he wish any one to draw him other than he was. But men can no more help loving and praising him than they can help loving and praising surpassing nobility anywhere, and his very honesty in modesty makes him all the more winning. Of all the great rulers of men, he is to this day at once the most dearly human and the most sincerely revered.

There is a certain mystery about Lincoln, as there is about every great and simple man; a mystery too simple, it may be, to be found out. If he seemed complex it was because, in the midst of many complexities, he was, after all, so simple; an uncommon man with common principles and virtues, who grew up in the backyard of the republic and ascended to power in a time of crisis. Our pioneer era is still so much a matter of romance to us that many fail to see how naturally Lincoln grew, born as he was in the wild hunting grounds of Daniel Boone, having for the background of his life the wide melancholy of the western plain, its shadowy forests, its low hills, and its winding waters. His genius was homespun, not exotic; it does not dazzle or amaze; does not baffle or bewilder; and is

thus an example and a legacy of inspiration. Yet no one who saw him ever saw another man like him. He stood apart; he was original; he was himself, genuine, simple, sincere. The more we know about him the greater he seems to be in his totality of powers, none of which was supremely great, but all of which, united and held in poise, made him at once so universal and so unique.

As if by an instinct of destiny Lincoln forefelt his future, but he was no Richelieu meditating aside the great uses to which Providence had put him. And surely, if ever of any one, we may reverently believe that this simple, gentle, wise, far-seeing, mighty man was raised up of God, and trained for his task. Amid threatening chaos he left his law office for the the highest place, with the sure step of power, as if it were a matter of course; giving his partner permission to use the firm name, as before, without a conscious trait of poetry; yet looking to the far future with a longing that was poetry. He ruled a great nation as he had practised law, having in conspicuous degree the three qualities which Emerson said attract the reverence of mankind - disinterestedness, practical power, and moral courage. Assuredly he was one of the marvels of history, and if his later fame differed vastly from his early life, the reason must be found in the anomaly of the man.

One who looks back over the life of Lincoln, and the stormy era in which he appeared-coming out of the shadow and vanishing into the shadow is left with a feeling of mingled wonder and awe. Yet hardly a throb of the embittered feeling, hardly a vestige of the acrimonious debates which precipitated that conflict is heard today, save in the feeble words of some belated zealot. All may now read with philosophical calm, when not with tearful reminiscence, the records of those memorable years, wondering the while whether some wiser method might not have been found to abolish slavery forgetting the dark problem in the menacing array of racial forces even now before us. Vain are all earthly counsels to determine the fate of nations in such times of crises. One who cannot see in all this the hand of an overruling Power, guid

nor

ing the course of human affairs, must believe that our human life is the sport of chance, or what Tacitus called it, a Divine jest at our frailty.

II

No figure on that stage was more pitiful than that of James Buchanan, whose fame would be whiter had he not sat in the White House.1 Old and infirm, alike ambitious and timid, he held the reins of an angry nation with a nerveless hand. That, during those mournful months, he often said that he was the last President of the United States, is almost certainly true. That he argued that the government had no right to defend its own life, is a matter of record. State after State seceded and made ready for war, seizing the arms, arsenals, and forts of the nation, and not a hand was put forth to hinder. The navy, as if by plan, was scattered to the four winds of the earth. Never a leader of men, the decrepit diplomat sat as if smitten by the palsy, while the nation went to pieces before his eyes. Admirable as an adviser when prudence and caution were the virtues in request, and when there was some one to lead, he was not the man for that wild and fateful hour. Dying in 1868, he had long outlived whatever influence he may once have enjoyed, and is remembered as a man who met a great opportunity and was not equal to it.

Well might Lincoln, who sat at home powerless to do anything, be abstracted and absent-minded, with a cloud of grief in his eyes; well might he say, "I shall never be glad any more." But, if sad, he was calm and firm during that trying ordeal, willing to conciliate but refusing to compromise, while the shadow gathered and the plot thickened. What a pity that the people of the South- and the North, too, for that matter did not know Lincoln as he knew them, and as all now know him. But the clouds were too dark for his kindly face to be seen, when, on that rainy February morning he said

1 Twenty Years of Congress, by J. G. Blaine, Vol. I, pp. 239-40 (1884).

2 Recollections, by Horace Greeley, p. 359 (1869).