h, never
forget their impression that at heart he is sad. His fondness for poetry
in the minor key has become a byword, especially the line "Oh, why
should the spirit of mortal be proud."

It is impossible to discover any law governing the succession of his
lapses in self-reliance. But they may be related very plausibly to his
sense of failure or at least to his sense of futility. He was one of
those intensely sensitive natures to whom the futilities of this world
are its most discouraging feature. Whenever such ideas were brought home
to him his energy flagged; his vitality, never high, sank. He was prone
to turn away from the outward life to lose himself in the inner. All
this is part of the phenomena which Herndon perceived more clearly than
he comprehended it, which led him to call Lincoln a fatalist.

A humbler but perhaps more accurate explanation is the reminder that he
was son to Thomas the unstable. What happened in Lincoln's mind when
he returned defeated from Washington, that ghost-like rising of the
impulses of old Thomas, recurred more than once thereafter. In fact
there is a period well-defined, a span of thirteen years terminating
suddenly on a day in 1862, during which the ghost of old Thomas is a
thing to be reckoned with in his son's life. It came and went, most of
the time fortunately far on the horizon. But now and then it drew near.
Always it was lurking somewhere, waiting to seize upon him in those
moments when his vitality sank, when his energies were in the ebb, when
his thoughts were possessed by a sense of futility.

The year 1859 was one of his ebb tides. In the previous year the rising
tide, which had mounted high during his success on the circuit, reached
its crest The memory of his failure at Washington was effaced. At
Freeport he was a more powerful genius, a more dominant personality,
than he had ever been. Gradually, in the months following, the high wave
subsided. During 1859 he gave most of his attention to his practice.
Though political speech-making continued, and though he did not impair
his reputation, he did nothing of a remarkable sort. The one literary
fragment of any value is a letter to a Boston committee that had invited
him to attend a "festival" in Boston on Jefferson's birthday. He
avowed himself a thoroughgoing disciple of Jefferson and pronounced the
principles of Jefferson "the definitions and axioms of free society."
Without conditions he identified his own cause wit