of logical lucidity.  He loved to point and enliven his reasoning by humorous illustrations, usually anecdotes of Western life, of which he had an inexhaustible store at his command.  These anecdotes had not seldom a flavor of rustic robustness about them, but he used them with great effect, while amusing the audience, to give life to an abstraction, to explode an absurdity, to clinch an argument, to drive home an admonition.  The natural kindliness of his tone, softening prejudice and disarming partisan rancor, would often open to his reasoning a way into minds most unwilling to receive it.

Yet his greatest power consisted in the charm of his individuality.  That charm did not, in the ordinary way, appeal to the ear or to the eye.  His voice was not melodious; rather shrill and piercing, especially when it rose to its high treble in moments of great animation.  His figure was unhandsome, and the action of his unwieldy limbs awkward.  He commanded none of the outward graces of oratory as they are commonly understood.  His charm was of a different kind.  It flowed from the rare depth and genuineness of his convictions and his sympathetic feelings.  Sympathy was the strongest element in his nature.  One of his biographers, who knew him before he became President, says:  “Lincoln’s compassion might be stirred deeply by an object present, but never by an object absent and unseen.  In the former case he would most likely extend relief, with little inquiry into the merits of the case, because, as he expressed it himself, it `took a pain out of his own heart.’” Only half of this is correct.  It is certainly true that he could not witness any individual distress or oppression, or any kind of suffering, without feeling a pang of pain himself, and that by relieving as much as he could the suffering of others he put an end to his own.  This compassionate impulse to help he felt not only for human beings, but for every living creature.  As in his boyhood he angrily reproved the boys who tormented a wood turtle by putting a burning coal on its back, so, we are told, he would, when a mature man, on a journey, dismount from his buggy and wade waist-deep in mire to rescue a pig struggling in a swamp.  Indeed, appeals to his compassion were so irresistible to him, and he felt it so difficult to refuse anything when his refusal could give pain, that he himself sometimes spoke of his inability to say “no” as a positive weakness.  But that certainly does not prove that his compassionate feeling was confined to individual cases of suffering witnessed with his own eyes.  As the boy was moved by the aspect of the tortured wood turtle to compose an essay against cruelty to animals in general, so the aspect of other cases of suffering and wrong wrought up his moral nature, and set his mind to work against cruelty, injustice, and oppression in general.