but too late, is uncertain.  But Lincoln composed a letter to break off his engagement.  He showed it to Joshua Speed, who told him that if he had the courage of a man he would not write to her, but see her and speak.  He did so.  She cried.  He kissed and tried to comfort her.  After this Speed had to point out to him that he had really renewed his engagement.  Again there may be some uncertainty whether on January 1, 1841, the bridal party had actually assembled and the bridegroom after long search was found by his friends wandering about in a state which made them watch day and night and keep knives from him.  But it is quite certain from his letters that in some such way on “the fatal 1st of January, 1841,” he broke down terribly.  Some weeks later he wrote to his partner:  “Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not.  To remain as I am is impossible.  I must die or be better, as it appears to me.”  After a while Speed was able to remove him to his own parents’ home in Kentucky, where he and his mother nursed him back to mental life.

Then in the course of 1841 Speed himself began to contemplate marriage, and Speed himself had painful searchings of heart, and Lincoln’s turn came to show a sureness of perception in his friend’s case that he wholly lacked in his own.  “I know,” he writes, “what the painful point with you is . . . it is an apprehension that you do not love her as you should.  What nonsense!  How came you to court her?  But you say you reasoned yourself into it.  What do you mean by that?  Was it not that you found yourself unable to reason yourself out of it?  Did you not think, and partly form the purpose, of courting her the first time you ever saw or heard of her?  What had reason to do with it at that early stage?” A little later the lady of Speed’s love falls ill.  Lincoln writes:  “I hope and believe that your present anxiety about her health and her life must and will for ever banish those horrid doubts which I know you sometimes felt as to the truth of your affection for her. . . .  Perhaps this point is no longer a question with you, and my pertinacious dwelling upon it is a rude intrusion upon your feelings.  If so, you must pardon me.  You know the hell I have suffered upon that point, and how tender I am upon it.”  When he writes thus it is no surprise to hear from him that he has lost his hypochondria, but it may be that the keen recollection of it gives him excessive anxieties for Speed.  On the eve of the wedding he writes:  “You will always hereafter be on ground that I have never occupied, and consequently, if advice were needed, I might advise wrong.  I do fondly hope, however, that you will never need comfort from abroad.  I incline to think it probable that your nerves will occasionally fail you for a while; but once you get them firmly graded now, that trouble is over for ever.  If you went through the ceremony calmly or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in any present,