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of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery, where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One whose offence for which he had been sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually, and the others danced, sang, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' or in other words, that he renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while he permits the best to be nothing better than tolerable. To return to the narrative. When we reached Springfield I stayed but one day, when I started on this tedious circuit where I now am. Do you remember my going to the city, while I was in Kentucky, to have a tooth extracted, and making a failure of it? Well, that same old tooth got to paining me so much that about a week since I had it torn out, bringing with it a bit of the jawbone, the consequence of which is that my mouth is now so sore that I can neither talk nor eat."

He was being talked about for governor, but believed it unadvisable to run for the office, as shown in a semi-official announcement in the Sangamon Journal, the editorial columns of which were always open to him:

"His talents and services endear him to the Whig party; but we do not believe he desires the nomination. He has already made great sacrifices in maintaining his party principles, and before his political friends asked him to make additional sacrifices, the subject should be well considered. The office for governor, which would of necessity interfere with the practice of his profession, would poorly compensate him for the loss of four of the best years of his life."

He therefore kept on with the law, but his mood did not become exactly gay. In February Speed, who had become engaged in the summer, was to be married, and Lincoln's comments are full of light on his own frame of mind. He warns his friend just before the wedding that a period of depression is likely to follow, due first to proable bad weather on the journey, second to "the absence of all business and conversation of friends which might direct his mind and give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare, and turn it to the bitterness of death." It is such thoughts as this that have led to the observation that Lincoln was by temperament a poet of meditation and melancholy.

On February 13, he wrote:

"If you went through the ceremony calmly or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in any present, you are safe beyond question, and in two or three

[graphic]

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF LINCOLN TAKEN BY HESLER AT CHICAGO IN

1857.

months, to say the most, will be the happiest of men."

On the 25th, he wrote:

"I shall be very lonesome without you. How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world! If we have no friends we have no pleasure, and if we have them we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss."

March 27, he says:

"It cannot be told how it thrills me with joy to hear you say you are 'far happier than you ever expected to be'. That much, I know, is enough. I know you too well to suppose your expectations were not, at least sometimes, extravagant, and if the reality exceeds them all, I say 'Enough, dear Lord.' I am not going beyond the truth when I tell you that the short space it took me to read your last letter gave me more pleasure than the total sum of all I have enjoyed since that fatal first of January, 1841. Since then it seems to me I should have been entirely happy but for the never-absent idea that there is one still unhappy whom I have contributed to make so. That kills my soul. I cannot but reproach myself for even wishing to be happy while she is otherwise. She accompanied a large party on the railroad cars to Jacksonville last Monday, and on her return spoke, so that I heard of it, of having enjoyed the trip exceedingly. God be praised for that."

Early in this year, 1842, he entered into what was known as the Washington movement, to

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