and built his fortune will bear further study.

He was composed of traits which seemed to contradict each other. In a
sense this is true of everyone. Dr. Holmes says (in substance): "The
vehicle in which each one of us crosses life's narrow isthmus between
two oceans is not a one-seated sulky, but an omnibus." Sometimes, as
depicted in that wonderful parable, _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, one
inmate ejects the others. But in Lincoln the various elements were
wrought as years passed by into harmony.

He was prized among his early companions as a wit and story-teller. The
women complained because at their parties all the men were drawn off to
hear Abe Lincoln's stories. When he came to be a public speaker, he
feathered the shafts of his argument with jest and anecdote. The vein of
humor in him was rich and deep; it helped him through the hard places.
When as President he announced to his cabinet the Emancipation
Proclamation, he first refreshed himself by reading to them a chapter
from Artemus Ward.

His early growth was in rough soil, and some of the mud stuck to
him,--his jests were sometimes broad. But if coarse in speech he was
pure in life, and neither the rancor of political hate nor the research
of unsparing biographers ever charged him with an unchaste act.

Along with this rollicking fun he had a vein of deepest melancholy. In
part it was temperamental. The malarial country sometimes bred a strain
of habitual depression. His mother was the natural daughter of a
Virginia planter, and had the sadness sometimes wrought by such
pre-natal conditions; it was said she was never seen to smile. Lincoln's
early years had hardships and trials, over many of which he triumphed,
and triumphed laughing; but there were others for which there was
neither victory nor mirth. Some of his early letters of intimate
friendship (as given in Hay and Nicolay's biography), show a singular
capacity for romantic affection, and gleams of hope of supreme
happiness. But death frustrated this hope, and the disappointment
brought him to the verge of insanity. In his domestic life,--it was an
open secret,--he had some of the experience which disciplined Socrates.
Perhaps we go to the root of his sadness if we say that in his deepest
heart he was a passionate idealist, and by circumstances he was long
shut out from the natural satisfaction of ideality. His partner Herndon
said of him, "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked."

Out of these