In the rebound after the woe following Ann’s death, he had gone questing after happiness—­such a real thing to him, now that he had discovered the terror of unhappiness—­in a foolish half-hearted courtship of a bouncing, sensible girl named Mary Owens, who saw that he was not really in earnest, decided that he was deficient in those “little links that make up a woman’s happiness,” and sent him about his business—­rather, on the whole, to his relief.(7) The affair with Miss Todd had a different tone from the other.  The lady was of another world socially.  The West in those days swarmed with younger sons, or the equivalents of younger sons, seeking their fortunes, whom sisters and cousins were frequently visiting.  Mary Todd was sister-in-law to a leading citizen of Springfield.  Her origin was of Kentucky and Virginia, with definite claims to distinction.  Though a family genealogy mounts as high as the sixth century, sober history is content with a grandfather and great grandfather who were military men of some repute, two great uncles who were governors, and another who was a cabinet minister.  Rather imposing contrasted with the family tree of the child of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks!  Even more significant was the lady’s education.  She had been to a school where young ladies of similar social pretensions were allowed to speak only the French language.  She was keenly aware of the role marked out for her by destiny, and quite convinced that she would always in every way live up to it.

The course of her affair with Lincoln did not run smooth.  There were wide differences of temperament; quarrels of some sort—­just what, gossip to this day has busied itself trying to discover—­and on January 1, 1841, the engagement was broken.  Before the end of the month he wrote to his law partner apologizing for his inability to be coherent on business matters.  “For not giving you a general summary of news, you must pardon me; it is not in my power to do so.  I am now the most miserable man living.  If what I feel were distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth.  Whether I shall ever be better, I can not tell.  I awfully forebode I shall not.  To remain as I am is impossible.  I must die or be better, it appears to me . . . a change of scene might help me.”

His friend Speed became his salvation.  Speed closed out his business and carried Lincoln off to visit his own relations in Kentucky.  It was the devotion of Bowlin Green and his wife over again.  But the psychology of the event was much more singular.  Lincoln, in the inner life, had progressed a long way since the death of Ann, and the progress was mainly in the way of introspection, of self-analysis.  He had begun to brood.  As always, the change did not reveal itself until an event in the outward life called it forth like a rising ghost from the abyss of his silences.  His friends had no suspicion that in his real self, beneath the thick disguise of his external sunniness, he was forever brooding, questioning, analyzing, searching after the hearts of things both within and without..