In addition, however, to these private gymnastics Lincoln shared with his neighbors a public and popular source of intellectual and human insight.  The Western pioneers, for all their exclusive devotion to practical purposes, wasted a good deal of time on apparently useless social intercourse.  In the Middle Western towns of that day there was, as we have seen, an extraordinary amount of good-fellowship, which was quite the most wholesome and humanizing thing which entered into the lines of these hard-working and hard-featured men.  The whole male countryside was in its way a club; and when the presence of women did not make them awkward and sentimental, the men let themselves loose in an amount of rough pleasantry and free conversation, which added the one genial and liberating touch to their lives.  This club life of his own people Lincoln enjoyed and shared much more than did his average neighbor.  He passed the greater part of what he would have called his leisure time in swapping with his friends stories, in which the genial and humorous side of Western life was embodied.  Doubtless his domestic unhappiness had much to do with his vagrancy; but his native instinct for the wholesome and illuminating aspect of the life around him brought him more frequently than any other cause to the club of loafers in the general store.  And whatever the promiscuous conversation and the racy yarns meant to his associates, they meant vastly more to Lincoln.  His hours of social vagrancy really completed the process of his intellectual training.  It relieved his culture from the taint of bookishness.  It gave substance to his humor.  It humanized his wisdom and enabled him to express it in a familiar and dramatic form.  It placed at his disposal, that is, the great classic vehicle of popular expression, which is the parable and the spoken word.

Of course, it was just because he shared so completely the amusements and the occupations of his neighbors that his private personal culture had no embarrassing effects.  Neither he nor his neighbors were in the least aware that he had been placed thereby in a different intellectual class.  No doubt this loneliness and sadness of his personal life may be partly explained by a dumb sense of difference from his fellows; and no doubt this very loneliness and sadness intensified the mental preoccupation which was both the sign and the result of his personal culture.  But his unconsciousness of his own distinction, as well as his regular participation in political and professional practice, kept his will as firm and vigorous as if he were really no more than a man of action.  His natural steadiness of purpose had been toughened in the beginning by the hardships and struggles which he shared with his neighbors; and his self-imposed intellectual discipline in no way impaired the stability of his character, because his personal culture never alienated him from his neighbors and threw him into a consciously critical frame of mind.  The time