as profoundly moved by
searching which could neither be silenced nor evaded; and his lot was
cast in a section where, as a rule, people read little and talked
much. Public speech was the chief instrumentality of political
education and the most potent means of persuasion; but behind the
platform, upon which Mr. Lincoln was to become a commanding figure,
were countless private debates carried on at street corners, in hotel
rooms, by the country road, in every place where men met even in the
most casual way. In these wayside schools Mr. Lincoln practiced the
art of putting things until he became a past-master in debate, both
formal and informal.

If all these circumstances, habits and conditions are studied in their
entirety, it will be seen that Mr. Lincoln's style, so far as its
formal qualities are concerned, is in no sense accidental or even
surprising. He was all his early life in the way of doing precisely
what he did in his later life with a skill which had become instinct.
He was educated, in a very unusual way, to speak for his time and to
his time with perfect sincerity and simplicity; to feel the moral
bearing of the questions which were before the country; to discern the
principles involved; and to so apply the principles to the questions
as to clarify and illuminate them. There is little difficulty in
accounting for the lucidity, simplicity, flexibility, and compass of
Mr. Lincoln's style; it is not until we turn to its temperamental and
spiritual qualities, to the soul of it, that we find ourselves
perplexed and baffled.

But Mr. Lincoln's possession of certain rare qualities is in no way
more surprising than their possession by Shakespeare, Burns, and
Whitman. We are constantly tempted to look for the sources of a man's
power in his educational opportunities instead of in his temperament
and inheritance. The springs of genius are purified and directed in
their flow by the processes of training, but they are fed from deeper
sources. The man of obscure ancestry and rude surroundings is often in
closer touch with nature, and with those universal experiences which
are the very stuff of literature, than the man who is born on the
upper reaches of social position and opportunity. Mr. Lincoln's
ancestry for at least two generations were pioneers and frontiersmen,
who knew hardship and privation, and were immersed in that great wave
of energy and life which fertilized and humanized the central West.
They were in