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mar, that she might be formally released from the obligation to him which he had so recklessly forfeited. Her friends argued with her that she was carrying her scruples too far, and at last, as neither man nor letter came, she permitted it to be understood that she would marry Abraham Lincoln as soon as his legal studies should be completed.

That was a glorious summer for him; the brightest, sweetest, hopefullest he yet had known. It was also the fairest time he was ever to see; for even now, as the golden days came and went, they brought an increasing shadow on their wings. It was a shadow that was not to pass away. Little by little came indications that the health of Ann Rutledge had suffered under the prolonged strain to which she had been subjected. Her sensitive nature had been strung to too high a tension, and the chords of her life were beginning to give way.

There were those of her friends who said that she died of a broken heart, but the doctors called it "brain-fever."

On the 25th of August, just before the summer died, she passed away from earth. But she never faded from the heart of Abraham Lincoln. She lived there in love and memory to the very last. In her early grave was buried the best hope he ever knew, and the shadow of that great darkness was never entirely lifted from him.

A few days before Ann's death, a message from her brought her betrothed to her bedside, and they were left alone. No one ever knew what passed between them in the endless moments of that last sad farewell; but Lincoln left the house with inexpressible agony written upon his face. He had been to that hour a man of marvelous poise and self-control, but the pain he now struggled with grew deeper and more deep, until, when they came and told him she was dead, his heart and will, and even his brain itself, gave way. He was utterly without help or the knowledge of possible help in this world or beyond it. He was frantic for the time, seeming even to lose the sense of his own identity, and all New Salem said that he was insane.

He piteously moaned and raved, "I can never be reconciled to have the snow, rains, and storms beat upon her grave!"

The very earth her body slept in gathered to its grassy covering somewhat of the unutterable tenderness the strong man felt for his first love. His best friends seemed to have lost their influence over him, and he resisted their kindly efforts at comfort or control with all the gloomy peevishness and even the cunning of a madman.

All but one; for the same Bowlin Greene who had helped Short save his property for him at the sheriff's sale came now again to the rescue. He managed to entice the poor fellow to his own home a short distance from the village, there to keep watch and ward over him until the fury of his sorrow should wear away. There were well-grounded fears lest he might do himself some injury, and the watch was vigilantly kept. In a few weeks reason again obtained the mastery, and it was safe to let him return to his studies and his work. He could indeed work again, and he could once more study law, for there was a kind of relief in steady occupation and absorbing toil; but he was not, could not ever be, the same man. In time even the joke and the laugh would come to his lips, but they would never cease to have the appearance and character of brief sunshine breaking through a cloud, and there was always a great storm of rain resolutely held back in the inner darkness of that cloud.

Lincoln had been fond of poetry from boyhood, and had gradually made himself familiar with large parts of Shakespeare's plays and the works of other great writers. He now discovered in a strange collection of crude verses, by an unknown hand, the one poem which seemed best to express the morbid, troubled, sore condition of his mind. Those who then or afterwards heard him repeat the lines by William Knox, beginning

"Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"

discovered what a wealth of pathetic expression could be poured forth through them. Uttered by him as the voice of his suffering, they took into their mournful cadences a power and a majesty borrowed from the grief which drove Abraham Lincoln from the grave of Ann Rutledge broken-hearted and all but insane.

All men in that vicinity well knew the sad, romantic story, and there were no hearts on the Sangamon prairies so hard that they were not touched by the sorrow of their friend and neighbor. His popularity increased daily as he went about among them, thin, haggard, gloomy, and he was more than ever the idol of New Salem. The winter passed away, and then the spring, and another summer brought with it a renewal of political excitement. There was no longer any question as to whether Mr. Lincoln should be elected to the Legislature. Thenceforward his place upon the Whig ticket was a matter of course so long as he should consent to such a use of his name. There was nothing, therefore, to mark for him especially the campaign of 1836, except the fact that he stumped the county and received a greater number of votes than was given to any other candidate who ran for the Legislature that year. In fact, among a population so shifting, changing, growing, he was already becoming one of the older and earlier settlers, and the majority of his fellow-citizens were new men compared to him.

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An Episode The Lightning-rod-The Long Nine-State ImprovementsAnti-slavery Declarations-1836.

THERE is nothing else on earth so easily to be taken possession of as an empty house, whether or not the new occupant may be or become the owner.

When Lincoln returned to work and to political excitement he also necessarily returned to the society of women. He sorely needed all three, and every other attainable help, to keep his mind in order. It could hardly be called well regulated as yet, and his emotional nature was entirely out of gear. Kind and busy friends, moreover, came to the rescue, and, by their management, in the autumn of 1836 he found himself corresponding with an attractive young lady named Mary Owens. He had not at all forgotten Ann Rutledge, and the matter would be hard to understand if so many of the letters which passed between the two had not been preserved and actually printed. They offer a sufficient explanation, for they make very plain the fact that there was no feeling aroused on either side at all worthy to be spoken of as "love." She was handsome, well educated, intelligent, with enough of good sense to admire a strong and rising man. He was restless, feverish, unsettled, hungry at heart-he did not know for what; and so there grew up an intimacy, a friendship, a protracted, struggling imitation of a courtship and engagement. From the latter they were both finally glad to release each other.

It is entirely just to say of Mr. Lincoln that during that brief period of his life he knew very little of himself. The

continual developments of his nature and its powers must now and then have brought surprises to him, but it is a curious fact that nobody else seems ever to have been greatly surprised. He was a man from whom uncommon performances were expected.

In joke or in earnest, or in somewhat of both, one of the first public utterances in behalf of female suffrage came from his pen. In a printed declaration of his principles, issued during the canvass for that year's election, he said among other things:

"I go for all sharing the privileges of the government who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms -by no means excluding females."

The subject was not then under discussion in Illinois, but Mr. Lincoln's after-course proved how prompt and decided was sure to be his response to any appeal to his sense of justice.

The style of his oratory was now rapidly improving, and his speeches became occasional surprises even to those who knew him best and expected most of him. He wasted nothing upon mere display, but then, as afterwards, he exhibited a marvelous capacity for using to advantage the smallest available fact or circumstance within his reach at the moment. The smaller and sharper might be the point of any thrust, the deeper he was apt to drive it home.

A good illustration of this faculty is found in a speech of his, in the campaign of 1836, in reply to a Mr. Forquer. This gentleman had deeply offended all notions of political morality by a recent desertion of the Whigs, and the feeling against him was very bitter. He was a man of wealth and standing, Register of the United States Land Office at Springfield, owning the best "frame house" in that town. From the roof of this residence arose the one solitary lightning-rod in all that part of the State, and it had attracted more than a little popular attention.

At a political meeting Mr. Lincoln made a speech of more

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