Abraham Lincoln by Stephen B. Oates

education in the “blab” schools of frontier Kentucky and Indiana. A gifted boy, he set about educating himself, borrowing whatever volumes he could find and reading the same one over and over. Contrary to legend, he did not study all night by the fireplace of the Lincolns’ one-room cabin. Until young Lincoln got a loft, the entire family slept by the fireplace, and bedtime for hardworking farmers came early. Young Lincoln would take his book to the field and read at the end of each plow furrow while his lathered horse got its breath; and he would read again at the noon break.
    In these delicious moments away from work, he would lose himself in romantic histories, in the adventures of Robinson Crusoe or the selected fables of Dilworth’s Spelling-Book . He practically memorized the grammars he came across, which taught him rhetoric—that is, dramatic and oratorical effectiveness—as well as the mechanics of writing. Young Lincoln fell in love with language, with metaphors, with assonance and alliteration. His writings sparkle with such gems as “old and only,” “a thousand thanks,” and “high and beautiful terms.” He delighted in creative expression, in the literary telling of a story. Even in a letter, as the critic Edmund Wilson pointed out, Lincoln could make a sentence sing with poetic eloquence. Another cause of his melancholy, he wrote at age thirty-three, was “ the absence of all business and conversation of friends , which might divert your mind, and give it occasional rest from that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” Consider, too, the cadences and alliteration in a speech Lincoln read at the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum when he was twenty-eight. “Let reverence for the laws,” Lincoln wrote, “be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;—let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexesand tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
    Lincoln’s mature writings, Wilson says, “do not give the impression of a folksy and jocular countryman spinning yarns at the village store.” Rather, they reveal a serious and literate Lincoln, “self-controlled” and “strong in intellect.”
    In truth, Lincoln had a talent for expression that in another time and place might have led him into a distinguished career in American letters. “By nature a literary artist,” as one biographer described him, he fancied poetry and wrote verse himself. Here is a poem he composed at thirty-seven, about a visit to his boyhood home in Indiana. He hadn’t seen the neighborhood in fourteen years, and nostalgia rose in him, easing his resentments for a region that held painful memories for him. Later, feeling pensive and poetic, he composed these lines:
    My childhood’s home I see again ,
And sadden with the view ;
And still, as memory crowds my brain ,
There’s pleasure in it too .
    O Memory! thou midway world
’Twixt earth and paradise ,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise ….
    The friends I left that parting day
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray ,
And half of all are dead .
    I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save ,
Till every sound appears a knell ,
And every spot a grave .
    I range the fields with pensive tread ,
And pace the hollow rooms ,
And feel (companions of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs .
    In his prose as in his verse, Lincoln strove to capture eighteenth-century rhythms without eighteenth-century pomposity. His public utterances, which he always wrote out