person,” lacking that indefinable quality akin to the honest passions of us ordinary men, but deeper and stronger, which alone could compel and could reward any true reverence for his memory.  These moments will recur but they cannot last.  A thousand little things, apparent on the surface but deeply significant; almost every trivial anecdote of his boyhood, his prime, or his closing years; his few recorded confidences; his equally few speeches made under strong emotion; the lineaments of his face described by observers whom photography corroborated; all these absolutely forbid any conception of Abraham Lincoln as a worthy commonplace person fortunately fitted to the requirements of his office at the moment, or as merely a “good man” in the negative and disparaging sense to which that term is often wrested.  It is really evident that there were no frigid perfections about him at all; indeed the weakness of some parts of his conduct is so unlike what seems to be required of a successful ruler that it is certain some almost unexampled quality of heart and mind went to the doing of what he did.  There is no need to define that quality.  The general wisdom of his statesmanship will perhaps appear greater and its not infrequent errors less the more fully the circumstances are appreciated.  As to the man, perhaps the sense will grow upon us that this balanced and calculating person, with his finger on the pulse of the electorate while he cracked his uncensored jests with all comers, did of set purpose drink and refill and drink again as full and fiery a cup of sacrifice as ever was pressed to the lips of hero or of saint.

5. The Election of Lincoln.

Unlooked-for events were now raising Lincoln to the highest place which his ambition could contemplate.  His own action in the months that followed his defeat by Douglas cannot have contributed much to his surprising elevation, yet it illustrates well his strength and his weakness, his real fitness, now and then startlingly revealed, for the highest position, and the superficial unfitness which long hid his capacity from many acute contemporaries.

In December, 1859, he made a number of speeches in Kansas and elsewhere in the West, and in February, 1860, he gave a memorable address in the Cooper Institute in New York before as consciously intellectual an audience as could be collected in that city, proceeding afterwards to speak in several cities of New England.  His appearance at the Cooper Institute, in particular, was a critical venture, and he knew it.  There was natural curiosity about this untutored man from the West.  An exaggerated report of his wit prepared the way for probable disappointment.  The surprise which awaited his hearers was of a different kind; they were prepared for a florid Western eloquence offensive to ears which were used to a less spontaneous turgidity; they heard instead a speech with no ornament at all, whose only beauty was that it was true and