for the great estate to which he had come, plucked as it were from
obscurity by a caprice of fortune.

Accepting the doctrine of inspiration as a law of the universe, I still
stand to this belief; but I must qualify it as far as it conveys the
idea that Mr. Lincoln was not as well equipped in actual knowledge of
men and affairs as any of his contemporaries. Mr. Webster once said that
he had been preparing to make his reply to Hayne for thirty years. Mr.
Lincoln had been in unconscious training for the presidency for thirty
years. His maiden address as a candidate for the Legislature, issued at
the ripe old age of twenty-three, closes with these words: "But if the
good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background,
I have been too familiar with disappointment to be very much chagrined."
The man who wrote that sentence, thirty years later wrote this sentence:
"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and
patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad
land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as
surely they will be, by the angels of our better nature." Between those
two sentences, joined by a kindred, somber thought, flowed a
life-current--

"Strong, without rage, without o'erflowing, full,"

pausing never for an instant; deepening whilst it ran, but nowise
changing its course or its tones; always the same; calm; patient;
affectionate; like one born to a destiny, and, as in a dream, feeling
its resistless force.

It is needful to a complete understanding of Mr. Lincoln's relation to
the time and to his place in the political history of the country, that
the student peruse closely the four speeches to which I have called
attention; they underlie all that passed in the famous debate with
Douglas; all that their author said and did after he succeeded to the
presidency. They stand to-day as masterpieces of popular oratory. But
for our present purpose the debate with Douglas will suffice--the most
extraordinary intellectual spectacle the annals of our party warfare
afford. Lincoln entered the canvass unknown outside the state of
Illinois. He closed it renowned from one end of the land to the other.

In that great debate it was Titan against Titan; and, perusing it after
the lapse of forty years, the philosophic and impartial critic will
conclude which got the better of it, Lincoln or Douglas, much according
to his sympathy with th