about Douglas," I said. "He is not a humbug. I like
his ironical voice against all these silly movements, like liquor laws;
these ideas like God in the little affairs of men; all this barbarism
which breaks into religious manias; all these half-baked reformations.
They carry me with him into an opposition to negro equality--all this
stuff of Horace Greeley, Emerson, and in which men like Seward and
Sumner, and American writers and poets, big and little, share."

"Oh, yes," said Abigail, "but after all you can say Douglas is just a
politician. You do not need to grieve about him. He is tough enough to
stand anything. He was put down by that mob. But I dare say he was not
as much disturbed about it as you were. If he should die to-day what
would the world lose? He has no great unfinished books, no half-painted
pictures, no musical scores without the final touches. Look over the
world, my friend. Do you realize who is living in it to-day? In Russia,
Tolstoi and Turgenieff; in Germany, Schopenhauer, Freytag, Liszt,
Wagner--Wagner is just Douglas' age too. In France, Hugo, George Sand,
Renan, Berlioz, Bizet. In England, Tennyson, Macaulay. These are only a
few. What has Douglas written or said that will live? What has he done
that will carry an influence to a future day? I want to see you lift
yourself out of this. Frankly, you seem to me like a man who has never
come to himself. You have lived here in Illinois since you were a boy.
You found work to do, and you did it. You wanted to be rich, you have
had your wish. But the material you have handled has become you. It has
entered the pores of your being, and become assimilated with its flesh.
You have gone on oblivious of this greater world. There is another
thing, and I have never known this to fail: you were a soldier in the
Mexican War, and the causes for which it was fought have burned
themselves into your nature. You are like a piece of clay molded and
lettered and shoved into the hot oven of war. You came forth with Young
America, Expansion burned into you. Douglas, being your close friend,
and being for these things, gave interpretations to these words. Your
glaze took the reflection of his face; and these words became other
words of like import, or imaginatively enlarged by the lights which his
winning art cast upon them. Give Douglas wit, humor, and he would carry
the whole country. For it runs after greatness of territory, railroads,
the equality of man, the superio