al bent to be
betrayed into mere extravagance and aberration. But with the sound
instinct of a well-balanced intelligence Lincoln seized upon the three
available books, the earnest study of which might best help to develop
harmoniously a strong and many-sided intelligence. He seized, that is,
upon the Bible, Shakespeare, and Euclid. To his contemporaries the Bible
was for the most part a fountain of fanatic revivalism, and Shakespeare,
if anything, a mine of quotations. But in the case of Lincoln,
Shakespeare and the Bible served, not merely to awaken his taste and
fashion his style, but also to liberate his literary and moral
imagination. At the same time he was training his powers of thought by
an assiduous study of algebra and geometry. The absorbing hours he spent
over his Euclid were apparently of no use to him in his profession; but
Lincoln was in his way an intellectual gymnast and enjoyed the exertion
for its own sake. Such a use of his leisure must have seemed a sheer
waste of time to his more practical friends, and they might well have
accounted for his comparative lack of success by his indulgence in such
secret and useless pastimes. Neither would this criticism have been
beside the mark, for if Lincoln's great energy and powers of work had
been devoted exclusively to practical ends, he might well have become in
the early days a more prominent lawyer and politician than he actually
was. But he preferred the satisfaction of his own intellectual and
social instincts, and so qualified himself for achievements beyond the
power of a Douglas.

In addition, however, to these private gymnastics Lincoln shared with
his neighbors a public and popular source of intellectual and human
insight. The Western pioneers, for all their exclusive devotion to
practical purposes, wasted a good deal of time on apparently useless
social intercourse. In the Middle Western towns of that day there was,
as we have seen, an extraordinary amount of good-fellowship, which was
quite the most wholesome and humanizing thing which entered into the
lines of these hard-working and hard-featured men. The whole male
countryside was in its way a club; and when the presence of women did
not make them awkward and sentimental, the men let themselves loose in
an amount of rough pleasantry and free conversation, which added the one
genial and liberating touch to their lives. This club life of his own
people Lincoln enjoyed and shared much more than did