say Hamlet or The Last Judgment. But just this is what the crude young
Lincoln understood. Somehow he had found it in the depths of his own
nature. The explanation, if any, is to be found in his heredity. Out
of the shadowy parts of him, beyond the limits of his or any man's
conscious vision, dim, unexplored, but real and insistent as those
forest recesses from which his people came, arise the two ideas: the
faith in a mighty governing power; the equal faith that it should use
its might with infinite tenderness, that it should be slow to compel
results, even the result of righteousness, that it should be tolerant of
human errors, that it should transform them slowly, gradually, as do the
gradual forces of nature, as do the sun and the rain.

And such was to be the real Lincoln whenever he spoke out, to the end.
His tonic was struck by his first significant utterance at the age of
twenty-eight. How inevitable that it should have no significance to the
congregation of good fellows who thought of him merely as one of their
own sort, who put up with their friend's vagary, and speedily forgot it.

The moment was a dreary one in Lincoln's fortunes. By dint of much
reading of borrowed books, he had succeeded in obtaining from the
easy-going powers that were in those days, a license to practise law. In
the spring of 1837 he removed to Springfield. He had scarcely a dollar
in his pocket. Riding into Springfield on a borrowed horse, with all the
property he owned, including his law books, in two saddlebags, he went
to the only cabinet-maker in the town and ordered a single bedstead.
He then went to the store of Joshua F. Speed. The meeting, an immensely
eventful one for Lincoln, as well as a classic in the history of genius
in poverty, is best told in Speed's words: "He came into my store, set
his saddle-bags on the counter and inquired what the furnishings for a
single bedstead would cost. I took slate and pencil, made a calculation