his average
neighbor. He passed the greater part of what he would have called his
leisure time in swapping with his friends stories, in which the genial
and humorous side of Western life was embodied. Doubtless his domestic
unhappiness had much to do with his vagrancy; but his native instinct
for the wholesome and illuminating aspect of the life around him brought
him more frequently than any other cause to the club of loafers in the
general store. And whatever the promiscuous conversation and the racy
yarns meant to his associates, they meant vastly more to Lincoln. His
hours of social vagrancy really completed the process of his
intellectual training. It relieved his culture from the taint of
bookishness. It gave substance to his humor. It humanized his wisdom and
enabled him to express it in a familiar and dramatic form. It placed at
his disposal, that is, the great classic vehicle of popular expression,
which is the parable and the spoken word.

Of course, it was just because he shared so completely the amusements
and the occupations of his neighbors that his private personal culture
had no embarrassing effects. Neither he nor his neighbors were in the
least aware that he had been placed thereby in a different intellectual
class. No doubt this loneliness and sadness of his personal life may be
partly explained by a dumb sense of difference from his fellows; and no
doubt this very loneliness and sadness intensified the mental
preoccupation which was both the sign and the result of his personal
culture. But his unconsciousness of his own distinction, as well as his
regular participation in political and professional practice, kept his
will as firm and vigorous as if he were really no more than a man of
action. His natural steadiness of purpose had been toughened in the
beginning by the hardships and struggles which he shared with his
neighbors; and his self-imposed intellectual discipline in no way
impaired the stability of his character, because his personal culture
never alienated him from his neighbors and threw him into a consciously
critical frame of mind. The time which he spent in intellectual
diversion may have diminished to some extent his practical efficiency
previous to the gathering crisis. It certainly made him less inclined to
the aggressive self-assertion which a successful political career
demanded. But when the crisis came, when the minds of Northern patriots
were stirred by the ugly alternative offer