him.  A last interview with the dying girl, at which no one was present, left him quite unmanned.  A period of violent agitation followed.  For a time he seemed completely transformed.  The sunny Lincoln, the delight of Clary’s Grove, had vanished.  In his place was a desolated soul—­a brother to dragons, in the terrible imagery of Job—­a dweller in the dark places of affliction.  It was his mother reborn in him.  It was all the shadowiness of his mother’s world; all that frantic reveling in the mysteries of woe to which, hitherto, her son had been an alien.  To the simple minds of the villagers with their hard-headed, practical way of keeping all things, especially love and grief, in the outer layer of consciousness, this revelation of an emotional terror was past understanding.  Some of them, true to their type, pronounced him insane.  He was watched with especial vigilance during storms, fogs, damp gloomy weather, “for fear of an accident.”  Surely, it was only a crazy man, in New Salem psychology, who was heard to say, “I can never be reconciled to have the snow, rains and storms beat upon her grave."(10)

In this crucial moment when the real base of his character had been suddenly revealed—­all the passionateness of the forest shadow, the unfathomable gloom laid so deep at the bottom of his soul—­he was carried through his spiritual eclipse by the loving comprehension of two fine friends.  New Salem was not all of the sort of Clary’s Grove.  Near by on a farm, in a lovely, restful landscape, lived two people who deserve to be remembered, Bowlin Green and his wife.  They drew Lincoln into the seclusion of their home, and there in the gleaming days of autumn, when everywhere in the near woods flickered downward, slowly, idly, the falling leaves golden and scarlet, Lincoln recovered his equanimity.(11) But the hero of Pigeon Creek, of Clary’s Grove, did not quite come hack.  In the outward life, to be sure, a day came when the sunny story-teller, the victor of Jack Armstrong, was once more what Jack would have called his real self.  In the inner life where alone was his reality, the temper which affliction had revealed to him was established.  Ever after, at heart, he was to dwell alone, facing, silent, those inscrutable things which to the primitive mind are things of every day.  Always, he was to have for his portion in his real self, the dimness of twilight, or at best, the night with its stars, “never glad, confident morning again.”

IV.  REVELATIONS

From this time during many years almost all the men who saw beyond the surface in Lincoln have indicated, in one way or another, their vision of a constant quality.  The observers of the surface did not see it.  That is to say, Lincoln did not at once cast off any of his previous characteristics.  It is doubtful if he ever did.  His experience was tenaciously cumulative.  Everything he once acquired, he retained, both in the outer life and