This strange episode reveals also that amid Lincoln’s silences, while the outward man appeared engrossed in everyday matters, the inward man had been seeking religion.  His failure to accept the forms of his mother’s creed did not rest on any lack of the spiritual need.  Though undefined, his religion glimmers at intervals through the Speed letters.  When Speed’s fiancee fell ill and her tortured lover was in a paroxysm of remorse and grief, Lincoln wrote:  “I hope and believe that your present anxiety and distress about her health and her life must and will forever banish those horrid doubts which I know you sometimes felt as to the truth of your affection for her.  If they can once and forever be removed (and I feel a presentment that the Almighty has sent your present affliction expressly for that object) surely nothing can come in their stead to fill their immeasurable measure of misery. . .  Should she, as you fear, be destined to an early grave, it is indeed a great consolation to know she is so well prepared to meet it.”

Again he wrote:  “I was always superstitious.  I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing you and your Fanny together, which union I have no doubt lie had foreordained.  Whatever He designs He will do for me yet.  ‘Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord’ is my text now.”

The duality in self-torture of these spiritual brethren endured in all about a year and a half, and closed with Speed’s marriage.  Lincoln was now entirely delivered from his demon.  He wrote Speed a charming letter, serene, affectionate, touched with gentle banter, valiant though with a hint of disillusion as to their common type.  “I tell you, Speed, our forebodings (for which you and I are peculiar) are all the worst sort of nonsense. .  You say you much fear that that elysium of which you have dreamed so much is never to be realized.  Well, if it shall not, I dare swear it will not be the fault of her who is now your wife.  I have no doubt that it is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize."(8)

V. PROSPERITY

How Lincoln’s engagement was patched up is as delicious an uncertainty, from gossip’s point of view, as how it had been broken off.  Possibly, as many people have asserted, it was brought about by an event of which, in the irony of fate, Lincoln ever after felt ashamed.(1) An impulsive, not overwise politician, James Shields, a man of many peculiarities, was saucily lampooned in a Springfield paper by some jaunty girls, one of whom was Miss Todd.