or a leader whose heart visibly glowed
with a sacred passion; they attributed his patience, the one quality of
greatness which after a while everybody might have discerned in him,
not to a self-mastery which almost passed belief, but to a tepid
disposition and a mediocre if not a low level of desire. We who read
of him to-day shall not escape our moments of lively sympathy with
these grumblers of the time; we shall wish that this man could ever
plunge, that he could ever see red, ever commit some passionate
injustice; we shall suspect him of being, in the phrase of a great
philosopher, "a disgustingly well-regulated person," lacking that
indefinable quality akin to the honest passions of us ordinary men, but
deeper and stronger, which alone could compel and could reward any true
reverence for his memory. These moments will recur but they cannot
last. A thousand little things, apparent on the surface but deeply
significant; almost every trivial anecdote of his boyhood, his prime,
or his closing years; his few recorded confidences; his equally few
speeches made under strong emotion; the lineaments of his face
described by observers whom photography corroborated; all these
absolutely forbid any conception of Abraham Lincoln as a worthy
commonplace person fortunately fitted to the requirements of his office
at the moment, or as merely a "good man" in the negative and
disparaging sense to which that term is often wrested. It is really
evident that there were no frigid perfections about him at all; indeed
the weakness of some parts of his conduct is so unlike what seems to be
required of a successful ruler that it is certain some almost
unexampled quality of heart and mind went to the doing of what he did.
There is no need to define that quality. The general wisdom of his
statesmanship will perhaps appear greater and its not infrequent errors
less the more fully the circumstances are appreciated. As to the man,
perhaps the sense will grow upon us that this balanced and calculating
person, with his finger on the pulse of the electorate while he cracked
his uncensored jests with all comers, did of set purpose drink and
refill and drink again as full and fiery a cup of sacrifice as ever was
pressed to the lips of hero or of saint.

5. _The Election of Lincoln_.

Unlooked-for events were now raising Lincoln to the highest place which
his ambition could contemplate. His own action in the months that
followed his defeat