blacksmith has an ingenuity as varied as his experiences. Whereas other
picaroes cheat or fight or love their ways, this hero uses his dexterity
at unaccustomed trades until it is little less than intoxicating to see
him rise to each emergency. He is a proletarian Odysseus, and his
history is a quaint _Odyssey_ of the roving artisan.

The matter of the Civil War, though very large in the American memory,
has in literature not quite reached a parity with the older matters of
the Settlement, the Revolution, and the Frontier, principally, no doubt,
because there has been only one period--and that a brief one--of
historical romance since the war. In connection with this matter,
however, there has been created the legend which at present is surely
the most potent of all the legendary elements dear to the American
imagination.

Abraham Lincoln is, strictly speaking, more than a legend; he has become
a cult. Immediately after his death he lived in the national mind for a
time as primarily a martyr; then emphasis shifted to his humor and a
whole literature of waggish tales and retorts and apologues assembled
around his name; then he passed into a more sentimental zone and endless
stories were multiplied about his natural piety and his habit of
pardoning innocent offenders. Out of the efflorescence of all these
aspects of legend which accompanied the centenary of his birth there has
since seemed to be emerging--though the older aspects still persist as
well--a conception of him as a figure at once lofty and familiar, at
once sad and witty, at once Olympian and human. Among poets of all
grades of opinion Lincoln is the chief native hero: Edwin Arlington
Robinson has best expressed in words as firm as bronze the Master's
reputation for lonely pride and forgiving laughter; John Gould Fletcher,
with an eloquence found nowhere else in his work, likens Lincoln to a