later home life, increased it. Twice he walked the sharp and narrow line that divides sanity from insanity.1 It is said that Lincoln was a many-sided man. I suggest that it is more accurate to say that he was a many-mooded man. His thoughts and acts were tinged and colored by his moods. Now, put all these qualities together his great reason, his living conscience, his practical sagacity, his sadness, his fatalism, his scepticism of the creeds and run them out into his daily life, and you have a glimpse of the man and his inner life. I felt these qualities when we were young together, and I feel them now. Because the nation felt them, it trusted him with unlimited power.2

But it is only a glimpse, for it leaves out of account the innate idealism of Lincoln, his mysticism, his deep unconscious poetry, and, above all, the persuasive and indefinable power of temperament. His sadness was largely due to his temperament, in which his final tragedy seemed always to be foreshadowed. In his temperament, too, lay that rare, unanalyzable quality which suffused his words and not only turned so many of them into literature, but gave them an influence they would not have had if uttered by another. To this day the smallest scrap of his writing has this distinctive touch and tone. There was logic in his speech, and humor, and human sympathy, and a clear mastery of words; but there was something deeper and more appealing. It was the quality of his temperament. In an unusual manner the inner forces of his nature played through his intellect; and when deeply stirred his whole being seemed to distill itself into his speech, so that to this day his personality clings to his words. It was a rare gift, and because what was deepest in him was akin to what is deepest in the life of man everywhere, his words, like those of Burns, have a far-echoing charm.

1 In his lecture on "Lincoln and Ann Rutledge," delivered in 1866, Mr. Herndon said that in his younger days, before 1835, Lincoln was an ardent, somewhat impetuous and impulsive man, having much more fire and fancy in him than afterwards, and rarely beshadowed by gloom. But the death of Ann Rutledge modified his nature, leaving him mortally wounded at heart. That sorrow subdued him to its own color, and clothed him in shadow.

2 Ms. letter to C. O. Poole, Jan., 1886.

As a thinker he was contemplative rather than speculative, such a man as Charles Lamb delighted to meet, with whom one "could hover over the confines of truth." His philosophy of life was quite simple, almost rudimentary, and easily defined; yet so peculiar was his angle of mental vision, so personal his point of view, that he seemed to have thought it out for the first time. Though familiar enough, it was in a sense original with him, for less than almost any other man he was influenced by the labors of other minds. He dealt with life at first hand, built his own thought-world, and no one need be reminded that such a task required laborious and incessant toil. He had difficulty in expressing himself, because he was not a master of the English language, and because so few words had the exact color and shape of his ideas. Mr. Herndon has described his outlook upon life with singular skill:

To know a man's philosophy is important. When well known, it leads to a full knowledge of his life and explains many of his acts, otherwise inexplicable. It is something that can be appealed to in case of doubt as evidence of a method of life. Lincoln, to use a Christian word, believed in predestination. To use a somewhat more classical word, he believed that fate ruled and doomed everything. He was heard to say, often and often, that what is to be will be; and no prayers of ours can change or reverse the decree: it is inevitable. Another part of his philosophy was that conditions make and rule the man, not man the conditions. In short, he believed in laws - general, universal, and eternal

that they governed both matter and mind from the beginning, if there was a beginning, to the very end, if there is to be an end. There were no miracles in his opinion outside of law.

It would follow - and did follow that he was a calm, cool, and patient man; that he had a broad charity for the weaknesses, foibles, and vices of mankind. He looked out from his noble nature upon the stern realities of life, the ludicrous and the sad, the foolish and the wise, and whispered to himself, "All this was decreed, it is inevitable, it was to be and now is." He waited upon the logic of events、 with more than a woman's patience, and at their blossoming time seized his grand opportunities — caught the flow of time and tided himself thereon. Come what would, weal

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