expression something delicate, tender, pathetic, poetic.  This was the young man with whom the phantoms of romance dallied, the young man who recited poems and was fanciful and speculative, and in love and despair, but upon whose brow there already gleamed the illumination of intellect, the inspiration of patriotism.  There were vast possibilities in this young man’s face.  He could have gone anywhere and done anything.  He might have been a military chieftain, a novelist, a poet, a philosopher, ah! a hero, a martyr—­and, yes, this young man might have been—­he even was Abraham Lincoln!  This was he with the world before him.  It is good fortune to have the magical revelation of the youth of the man the world venerates.  This look into his eyes, into his soul—­not before he knew sorrow, but long before the world knew him—­and to feel that it is worthy to be what it is, and that we are better acquainted with him and love him the more, is something beyond price.

[Illustration:  LINCOLN IN 1863.

From a photograph by Brady, taken in Washington.]

[Illustration:  LINCOLN IN 1854—­HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.

From a photograph owned by Mr. George Schneider of Chicago, Illinois, former editor of the “Staats Zeitung,” the most influential anti-slavery German newspaper of the West.  Mr. Schneider first met Mr. Lincoln in 1853, in Springfield.  “He was already a man necessary to know,” says Mr. Schneider.  In 1854 Mr. Lincoln was in Chicago, and Mr. Isaac N. Arnold, a prominent lawyer and politician of Illinois, invited Mr. Schneider to dine with Mr. Lincoln.  After dinner, as the gentlemen were going down town, they stopped at an itinerant photograph gallery, and Mr. Lincoln had the above picture taken for Mr. Schneider.  The newspaper he holds in his hands is the “Press and Tribune.”  The picture has never before been reproduced.]

[Illustration:  LINCOLN IN FEBRUARY, 1860, AT THE TIME OF THE COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH.

From a photograph by Brady.  The debate with Douglas in 1858 had given Lincoln a national reputation, and the following year he received many invitations to lecture.  One came from a young men’s Republican club in New York,—­for one in a series of lectures designed for an audience of men and women of the class apt to neglect ordinary political meetings.  Lincoln consented, and in February, 1860 (about three months before his nomination for the Presidency), delivered what is known from the hall in which it was delivered, as the “Cooper Institute speech”—­a speech which more than confirmed his reputation.  While in New York he was taken by the committee of entertainment to Brady’s gallery, and sat for the portrait reproduced above.  It was a frequent remark with Lincoln that this portrait and the Cooper Institute speech made him President.]