Germany, Schopenhauer, Freytag, Liszt, Wagner—­Wagner is just Douglas’ age too.  In France, Hugo, George Sand, Renan, Berlioz, Bizet.  In England, Tennyson, Macaulay.  These are only a few.  What has Douglas written or said that will live?  What has he done that will carry an influence to a future day?  I want to see you lift yourself out of this.  Frankly, you seem to me like a man who has never come to himself.  You have lived here in Illinois since you were a boy.  You found work to do, and you did it.  You wanted to be rich, you have had your wish.  But the material you have handled has become you.  It has entered the pores of your being, and become assimilated with its flesh.  You have gone on oblivious of this greater world.  There is another thing, and I have never known this to fail:  you were a soldier in the Mexican War, and the causes for which it was fought have burned themselves into your nature.  You are like a piece of clay molded and lettered and shoved into the hot oven of war.  You came forth with Young America, Expansion burned into you.  Douglas, being your close friend, and being for these things, gave interpretations to these words.  Your glaze took the reflection of his face; and these words became other words of like import, or imaginatively enlarged by the lights which his winning art cast upon them.  Give Douglas wit, humor, and he would carry the whole country.  For it runs after greatness of territory, railroads, the equality of man, the superiority of the white race.  As dull as the mob is it knows that Douglas does not stand for its morality and its God.  If he had wit he could make them laugh and forget the distance that divides him from them.  We all understand why he has enemies; why the revolutionaries from Germany, Hungary, Austria, divide in doubt over him.  But what has he to carry against them that will be a loss to the world, if he fails?” I felt a little apologetic for my devotion to Douglas as Abigail talked.  Had I made a god of a poor piece of clay?  No, it was not true.  I knew him, I believed in him.  He was the clearest voice in all this rising absurdity of American life.  But Abigail had given me one idea that I wished to act upon.

I went the next day to see Stoddard and started to learn etching.  If I could only transfer to the copper plate what I had seen of sand hills, pines, pools of water, the gulls over the lake, the picturesque shacks of early Chicago of 1833 and 1840; the old wooden drawbridge, which was over the river in 1834, with the ships beyond it toward the lake and the lighthouse, and in the forefront canoes on the shore, covered with rushes and sand grass.  After a few days I saw Douglas.  He came on an evening when I was just about to go to him.  I had been thinking of him day by day, but waiting for the effect of his rough experience in front of the North Market to wear away from his thoughts and mine.  He was now himself again, his eye keen, his voice melodious, his figure