trait, and each of us must follow that which his own nature renders intelligible or congenial for him.  To us, who know the awful closing acts of his life-drama, it seems so appropriate that there should be an impressive unity, and so an inevitable backward influence working from the end towards the beginning, that we cannot avoid, nor would avoid, an instinctive belief that an occult moral and mental condition already existed in the years of Lincoln’s life which we are now observing, although the profound cause of that condition lay wholly in the future, in the years which were still far away.  There is a charm in the very unreason and mysticism of such a faith, and mankind will never quite fail to fancy, if not actually to believe, that the life which Lincoln had to live in the future wrought in some inexplicable way upon the life which he was living in the present.  The explanation is not more strange than the enigma.

Returning now to the narrative, an unpleasant necessity is encountered.  It must be confessed that the atmosphere of romance which lingers around this love-tale of the fair and sweet Ann Rutledge, so untimely taken away, is somewhat attenuated by the fact that only some fifteen months rolled by after she was laid in the ground before Lincoln was again intent upon matrimony.  In the autumn of 1836 Miss Mary Owens, of Kentucky, appeared in New Salem,—­a comely lass, with “large blue eyes,” “fine trimmings,” and a long and varied list of attractions.  Lincoln immediately began to pay court to her, but in an ungainly and morbid fashion.  It is impossible to avoid feeling that his mind was not yet in a natural and healthy condition.  While offering to marry her, he advised her not to have him.  Upon her part she found him “deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman’s happiness.”  So she would none of him, but wedded another and became the mother of some Confederate soldiers.  Lincoln did not suffer on this second occasion as he had done on the first; and in the spring of 1838 he wrote upon the subject one of the most unfortunate epistles ever penned, in which he turned the whole affair into coarse and almost ribald ridicule.  In fact he seems as much out of place in dealing with women and with love as he was in place in dealing with politicians and with politics, and it is pleasant to return from the former to the latter topics.[40]

The spring of 1836 found Lincoln again nominating himself before the citizens of Sangamon County, but for the last time.  His party denounced the caucus system as a “Yankee contrivance, intended to abridge the liberties of the people;” but they soon found that it would be as sensible to do battle with pikes and bows, after the invention of muskets and cannon, as to continue to oppose free self-nomination to the Jacksonian method of nomination by convention.  In enjoying this last opportunity, not only of presenting himself, but also of constructing his own “platform,” Lincoln published the following card:—­