re-place with hands
outspread, and murmuring his favorite verses,--a soliloquy on the
mournfulness and mystery of life: "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal
be proud!"

In his early youth he read eagerly and thoroughly such few books as came
in his way. Later, his taste for reading seemed to grow less. He had a
keen instinct for reality, and perhaps he found little in books that
satisfied him. For poetry and philosophy he had small aptitude, and in
science he had no training. What books he read he seemed to digest and
get the pith of. Once, made suddenly conscious by defeat of his lack of
book-culture, he took up Euclid's geometry, and resolutely studied and
re-studied it. Doubtless that helped him in the close logic which often
characterized his speeches. The strength of his speeches lay in their
logic, their close regard to fact, their adaptation to the plain people
of whom he was one, their homely illustrations, and, as the years
developed him, an appeal to some high principle of duty. His chief
library was men and women. From them, and from his own experience, he
drew the elements of his politics, history, philosophy.

He had the ambition natural to a man of high powers. With all his genial
sociability, he was in a way self-centered. His associates often thought
him,--and Lamon shares the opinion--not only moody and meditative, but
unsocial, cold, impassive; bent on his own ends, and using other men as
his instruments. Partly we may count this as the judgment of the crowd
to whom Lincoln's inner life was unimaginable. He shared their social
hours, and then withdrew into thoughts and feelings and purposes which
he could share with no one. Doubtless, too, he was in fault for some of
that neglect of the small courtesies and kindnesses which besets men
whose own thoughts fascinate them too strongly. There is a graphic
touch, in the story of his love affairs, of a girl who rejected his
advances because she had seen him on a hot day walk up a hill with a
woman and never offer to relieve her of the baby she was carrying.

As a lawyer he won more than ordinary success, making good his lack of
erudition by shrewdness and knowledge of human nature. It was observed
that he always tried a case honestly and fairly; that he was not fond of
controversy, and always preferred to settle a case out of court; that he
never argued well or strongly unless his conviction was fully on his
client's side; that, if unconvinced himself, he s