"His talents and services endear him to the Whig party; but we do not believe he desires the nomination. He has already made great sacrifices in maintaining his party principles, and before his political friends asked him to make additional sacrifices, the subject should be well considered. The office for governor, which would of necessity interfere with the practice of his profession, would poorly compensate him for the loss of four of the best years of his life."

He therefore kept on with the law, but his mood did not become exactly gay. In February Speed, who had become engaged in the summer, was to be married, and Lincoln's comments are full of light on his own frame of mind. He warns his friend just before the wedding that a period of depression is likely to follow, due first to proable bad weather on the journey, second to "the absence of all business and conversation of friends which might direct his mind and give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare, and turn it to the bitterness of death." It is such thoughts as this that have led to the observation that Lincoln was by temperament a poet of meditation and melancholy.

On February 13, he wrote:

"If you went through the ceremony calmly or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in any present, you are safe beyond question, and in two or three

1857.

months, to say the most, will be the happiest of men."

On the 25th, he wrote:

"I shall be very lonesome without you. How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world! If we have no friends we have no pleasure, and if we have them we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss."

March 27, he says:

"It cannot be told how it thrills me with joy to hear you say you are 'far happier than you ever expected to be'. That much, I know, is enough. I know you too well to suppose your expectations were not, at least sometimes, extravagant, and if the reality exceeds them all, I say 'Enough, dear Lord.' I am not going beyond the truth when I tell you that the short space it took me to read your last letter gave me more pleasure than the total sum of all I have enjoyed since that fatal first of January, 1841. Since then it seems to me I should have been entirely happy but for the never-absent idea that there is one still unhappy whom I have contributed to make so. That kills my soul. I cannot but reproach myself for even wishing to be happy while she is otherwise. She accompanied a large party on the railroad cars to Jacksonville last Monday, and on her return spoke, so that I heard of it, of having enjoyed the trip exceedingly. God be praised for that."

Early in this year, 1842, he entered into what was known as the Washington movement, to

G

suppress the evils of intemperance. He had always been singularly abstemious for a frontier politician, but he gained nothing with the church people by championing the good cause, but rather hostility, for his frankness led in one speech to his statement that those who had never fallen victims to the vice were spared more by lack of appetite than by any superiority, and that taken as a class drunkards would compare favorably in head and heart with any other.

His frame of mind as summer came on is recorded by himself in a letter of July 4, to Speed:

"I must gain confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made. In that ability I once prided myself as the only chief gem of my character; that gem I lost, how and where you know too well. I have not regained it; and until I do I cannot trust myself in any matter of much importance. I believe. now that had you understood my case at the time as well as I understood yours afterward, by the aid you would have given me I should have sailed through clear; but that does not now afford me sufficient confidence to begin that or the like of that again. . . . I always was superstitious; I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing Fanny and you together, which union I have no doubt he had foreordained. Whatever He designs He will do for me yet. 'Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord,' is my text just now. If, as you say, you have told Fanny all, I have no objection to her