Hon. Schuyler Colfax repeats a similarly pathetic expression which fell from the lips of the afflicted President.  “One morning,” says Mr. Colfax, “calling upon him on business, I found him looking more than usually pale and careworn, and inquired the reason.  He replied with the bad news he had received at a late hour the previous night, which had not yet been communicated to the press, adding that he had not closed his eyes or breakfasted; and, with an expression I shall never forget, he exclaimed, ’How willingly would I exchange places today with the soldier who sleeps on the ground in the Army of the Potomac!’”

A lady who saw Lincoln in the summer of 1864 for the first time, and who had expected to see “a very homely man,” says:  “I was totally unprepared for the impression instantly made upon me.  So bowed and sorrow-laden was his whole person, expressing such weariness of mind and body, as he dropped himself heavily from step to step down to the ground.  But his face!—­oh, the pathos of it!—­haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach.  I was so penetrated with the anguish and settled grief in every feature, that I gazed at him through tears, and felt I had stepped upon the threshold of a sanctuary too sacred for human feet.  The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world.”

The changes in Lincoln’s appearance were noted in the subdued, refined, purified expression of his face, as of one struggling almost against hope, but still patiently enduring.  Mr. Brooks says, “I have known impressionable women, touched by his sad face and his gentle bearing, to go away in tears.”  Another observer, Rev. C.B.  Crane, wrote at the time:  “The President looks thin and careworn.  His form is bowed as by a crushing load; his flesh is wasted as by incessant solicitude; and his face is thin and furrowed and pale, as though it had become spiritualized by the vicarious pain which he endured in bearing on himself all the calamities of his country.”  Truly it might be said of him, in the words of Matthew Arnold: 

    With aching hands and bleeding feet
      We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
    We bear the burden and the heat
      Of the long day, and wish ’t were done. 
    Not till the hours of light return
      All we have built do we discern.

In the tragic experiences of Lincoln in these dark days, the outlook was less gloomy than it had seemed to his tortured soul.  He was even then, as Mr. John Bigelow puts it, “making for himself a larger place in history than he had any idea of.”  He “builded better than he knew”; and the “hours of light” were soon to come when he would know what he had built and see the signs that promised better things.  The Presidential election of 1864 demonstrated the abiding confidence