matter of
justice, is it not due to them? I admit I am ambitious and would like to
be President.... But there is no such good luck in store for me as the
Presidency of these United States." There was a pathos about this man
Lincoln which won my heart.

I spent some evenings now with Aldington and Abigail. We drove out to
see the Douglas property south of the town. A horse-car line was being
built from Randolph Street to 12th Street, but beyond that was the waste
of sand and of scrub oaks, and the land which Douglas had all but lost
in financing himself in this campaign. I was ready to help Douglas with
money if he would accept it from me; but just now he was not an easy man
to find, and he did not come to me.

The trial and execution of John Brown was another thunderclap. And
Abigail showed me what was being said about it. A certain Henry
Thoreau, a strange, radical soul living in the woods near Concord,
Massachusetts, had compared John Brown to Christ. "Some eighteen hundred
years ago," Thoreau said, "Christ was crucified; this morning perchance
Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of the chain which is not
without its links. He is not old Brown any longer; he is an angel of
light.... I foresee the time when a painter will paint that scene, no
longer going to Rome for a subject. The poet will sing it, the historian
will record it; and with the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers and the
Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future
national gallery when at least the present form of slavery shall be no
more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown."

Could it be possible that this Captain Brown should have his
Pinturicchio? Well, might it not be so since Victor Hugo, living in
exile, had also given Brown an apotheosis? Abigail also had Walt
Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_, who was preaching the doctrine of
brotherhood, democracy, resistance to the law.

"What sort of country is this?" I asked Abigail. "Can every one set
himself up as a judge of the laws and disobey them if he chooses? If you
had heard Douglas' speech you would be convinced that this sort of mania
will cease or there will be war. Even Emerson is among these idealistic
rebels, for he says that it is a lack of health to cry 'madman' at a
hero as he passes. I think the Bible is responsible for much of this
turmoil and foolish rebellion, if not all of it. Lincoln founded his
campaign upon the Bible: a house divi