s tears, falling ever in the shadows at the backs of things--this
was the spiritual horizon from which he could not escape. Out of the
circle of that horizon he had to rise by spiritual apprehension in order
to be consoled. And there is no reason to doubt that at times, if not
invariably, in his early days, he did rise; he found consolation. But
it was all without form. It was a sentiment, a mood,--philosophically
bodiless. This indefinite mysticism was the real heart of the forest
world, closer than hands or feet, but elusive, incapable of formulation,
a presence, not an idea. Before the task of expressing it, the forest
mystic stood helpless. Just what it was that he felt impinging upon him
from every side he did not know. He was like a sensitive man, neither
scientist nor poet, in the midst of a night of stars. The reality of his
experience gave him no power either to explain or to state it.

There is little reason to suppose that Lincoln's religious experience
previous to 1860 was more than a recurrent visitor in his daily life.
He has said as much himself. He told his friend Noah Brooks "he did not
remember any precise time when he passed through any special change of
purpose, or of heart, but he would say that his own election to office
and the crisis immediately following, influentially determined him
in what he called 'a process of crystallization' then going on in his
mind."(1)

It was the terrible sense of need--the humility, the fear that he might
not be equal to the occasion--that searched his soul, that bred in him
the craving for a spiritual up-holding which should be constant. And at
this crucial moment came the death of his favorite son. "In the lonely
grave of the little one lay buried Mr. Lincoln's fondest hopes, and
strong as he was in the matter of self-control, he gave way to an
overmastering grief which became at length a serious menace to his
health."(2) Though firsthand accounts differ as to just how he struggled
forth out of this darkness, all agree that the ordeal was very severe.
Tradition makes the crisis a visit from the Reverend Francis Vinton,
rector of Trinity Church, New York, and his eloquent assertion of the
faith in immortality, his appeal to Lincoln to remember the sorrow
of Jacob over the loss of Joseph, and to rise by faith out of his own
sorrow even as the patriarch rose.(3)

Although Lincoln succeeded in putting his grief behind him, he never
forgot it. Long afterward, he calle