manner of address was usually awkward, but was often impassioned and full of fire; while his great fund of aptly told stories enabled him always to draw large and delighted gatherings of people, whenever he was known or expected to appear on the stump.

With

It was at this, or rather at an earlier, period of his career that Lincoln had his unhappy experience of lovemaking, the first episode ending calamitously in the death of Ann Rutledge, a young lady to whom the now rising Western publicist and orator seems to have been tenderly attached. The shock of her early death, we are told, threw the devoted lover into transports of grief, which appears for a time to have threatened his reason. the assuagement of Time and preoccupation in his professional and political life, Lincoln, as we know, however, got over his early bereavement, and in 1842 married Mary Todd, of Lexington, Ky. This marriage, it is admitted, was not a happy one, owing partly to the lady's superior education and higher social position, though perhaps more truly to incompatibility of temper. Of the alliance, Lincoln, however, was never known to complain, obviously influenced in this respect by motives which did him honor; while he ever bore himself towards his wife as became a considerate and leal-hearted gentleman.

Great issues were now commencing to loom on the political horizon, when Lincoln was to take a prominent, and at length a commanding, position in their discussion and direction. To the consideration and handling of these issues the orator's phenomenal gifts and qualities of heart and brain were very helpful in enabling him to unravel the knots, and in leading him to divine the course the issues ought to take in the broadest interests of the nation. Before this era, the frontier "rail-splitter" had provisionally become a member of Congress; but it was not until the year 1854, four years after Clay's Missouri Compromise Bill had transferred the preponderance of power to the South, by opening the territories to

the extension of slavery and enforcing the FugitiveSlave Law, that Lincoln's political career actively and influentially began. It was at this juncture also that Judge Stephen A. Douglas, an Illinois senator, came into national prominence and influence. With the latter, "the little giant " as Douglas was popularly called, Lincoln had ere this crossed swords in heated debate, when in 1858 both men were in the running for the United States Senate, Lincoln on the Republican and anti-slavery side, and his opponent on the Democratic ticket, favoring the South and its eagerness for non-interference with its peculiar institution and opposing sectional limitation to the extension of slavery. By this time, the die was now about to be cast, the several political parties ranging themselves in opposing camps, and heralding the coming of the "irrepressible conflict," which for years was to sunder the nation and bring on the dire horrors of the War of the Rebellion. Meanwhile Lincoln's notable controversy with Douglas greatly enhanced the reputation the orator had gained as a debater, while it brought him favorably into notice as a likely candidate for the Republican nomination to the Presidency. His availability for the high post was further shown when an Illinois committee that had favored his claims despatched Lincoln to make a speech at New York and rouse the East by his discussion of the momentous questions of the time. The mission was Lincoln's opportunity, and grandly did he rise to the occasion, as we see in the memorable speech he delivered in Feb. 1860, before an immense and enthusiastic audience at the Cooper Institute, New York. The speech, which was remarkable for its earnestness and moral force, as well as for its astute use of constitutional logic, created a furore and spread the Western orator's fame throughout the East, where his name was already spoken of as a possible nominee for the chief office in the nation. The speech was followed by other effective utterances in New Eng

land, where, in his inimitable way, Lincoln made a deep impression, despite his rough, almost uncouth, appearance, and the caution that had been given him, which he literally obeyed, to refrain from diverting his audiences with his witticisms and amusing Western stories. On his return to Illinois, political matters advanced rapidly, and Mr. Seward, Honest Abe's chief rival for the Presidency, was soon to hear of the two great political parties ranging themselves in hostile array, and to see the North dividing itself into a preponderating element, styled Lincoln States. This was followed by party dissensions and waverings, and by an ominous split in the Democratic camp, hastened by the rising indignation in the North over the threat of Southern Secession and the precipitation of armed strife.

The nation now neared the era of its heavy and sore trial, at the approach of which Buchanan, then chief magistrate, stood perplexed and irresolute, unable to meet and deal with, far less to avert, the coming crisis. His term of office was to expire in the following March (1861), and in the month of May, 1860, the National Republican Convention met at Chicago to select a candidate to succeed Buchanan in the Presidency. That the choice was likely now to be a Western man was pretty evident, since of late the centre of political power had crept Westward; while the "available" man, as we have indicated, appeared to be the plain, modest, undistinguished lawyer of Springfield, Ill., a man thought to be eminently "safe" from the politician's point of view, yet who was exceedingly popular in his own State, and was now beginning to be widely known for his great oratorical and logical powers, his moderate views, and his intimate acquaintance with the distracting questions of the time. The contest, on the Republican side, was between Seward, Chase, and Lincoln; on the Democratic side, the rival candidates were Breckinridge, the Southern favorite; Douglas, the representative of Northern Democracy; and

Bell (Governor of Tennessee), the standard-bearer of what was then termed the Constitutional Union Party. Of these various men in the field for the high prize, Lincoln, in the estimation of the political wirepullers, was deemed the least likely to win, for, in comparison with his rivals, he was comparatively unknown; while even up to this period few persons, as it has been said, “realized the grandeur of Lincoln's character, his splendid common sense, and his marvellous insight into the real nature of things." He moreover represented, as the same authority (Prof. Edward Channing) has expressed it, "that which was best in American life, under every disadvantage of birth and breeding, he raised himself by his own exertions to the level of the best statesmen of the day. His sincerity, his straightforwardness, his keen perception of right and wrong, were all enforced by a sense of humor and a kindliness of bearing that endeared him to all with whom he came in contact." He was, moreover, as we know, ever near to the people, and had that gentleness of nature which put him in sympathy with the masses and tender towards human hearts in trouble. As the critic, Mr. Hamilton Mabie, writes: "It was this deep heart of pity and love in him which carried him far beyond the reaches of statesmanship or oratory, and gave his words the finality of expression which marks the noblest art." Of his poetic temperament, the same writer thoughtfully remarks, "that there was a deep vein of poetry in Mr. Lincoln is clear to one who reads the story of his early life; and his innate idealism, set in surroundings so harsh and rude, had something to do with his melancholy. The sadness which was mixed with his whole life, was, however, largely due to his temperament; in which the final tragedy seemed always to be predicted. In that temperament, too, is hidden the secret of the rare quality of nature and mind which suffused his public speech and turned so much of it into literature. There was humor in it, there was deep human sympathy,

there was clear mastery of words for the use to which he put them; but there was something deeper and more persuasive, there was the quality of his temperament; and temperament is a large part of genius. The inner forces of his nature played through his thought; and when great occasions touched him to the quick, his whole nature shaped his speech and gave it clear intelligence, deep feeling, and that beauty which is distilled out of the depths of the sorrows and hopes of the world."

Such was the manner, and such were the characteristic qualities, of the man whom Providence had now raised up to preside over the destinies of the nation at a most grave and calamitous crisis in its historic annals. What his political education had been, and what success he had hitherto gained, we have, in the course of this article, endeavored to point out, and especially the fame he had won as a speaker and debater after his contest with Judge Douglas over the senatorship, a contest, as the present writer has elsewhere said, "that showed in a remarkable manner what his powers were in the field of national as well as of local politics, and how effectively he had mastered the constitutional and other questions of the time that enabled him to vanquish his adversary. Other gifts and qualities as a debater brought him success, particularly those that extort admiration from an intelligent, dispassionate audience, namely, restraint in the speaker, that puts a check upon unfair as well as inconclusive argument, and the absence of temper and of anything bitter or personal in the style and manner of his address. In these respects, the future President was invariably honest with himself, as well as with his opponent and his hearers, and never allowed himself to utter an unbecoming taunt or fling at those opposed to him, even in the most heated of party controversies. Such, as we have said, were the traits of the man who, when great issues were beginning to loom on the troubled political horizon, was to take a commanding position in