cloud of illusive witnesses is that Springfield wondered why Mary Todd
married Lincoln. He was still poor; so poor that after marriage they
lived at the Globe Tavern on four dollars a week. And the lady had been
sought by prosperous men! The lowliness of Lincoln's origin went ill
with her high notions of her family's importance. She was downright,
high-tempered, dogmatic, but social; he was devious, slow to wrath,
tentative, solitary; his very appearance, then as afterward, was
against him. Though not the hideous man he was later made out to be--the
"gorilla" of enemy caricaturists--he was rugged of feature, with a lower
lip that tended to protrude. His immense frame was thin and angular; his
arms were inordinately long; hands, feet and eyebrows were large; skin
swarthy; hair coarse, black and generally unkempt. Only the amazing,
dreamful eyes, and a fineness in the texture of the skin, redeemed the
face and gave it distinction.(3) Why did precise, complacent Miss Todd
pick out so strange a man for her mate? The story that she married
him for ambition, divining what he was to be--like Jane Welsh in the
conventional story of Carlyle--argues too much of the gift of prophecy.
Whatever her motive, it is more than likely that she was what the
commercialism of to-day would call an "asset." She had certain qualities
that her husband lacked. For one, she had that intuition for the main
chance which shallow people confound with practical judgment. Her soul
inhabited the obvious; but within the horizon of the obvious she was
shrewd, courageous and stubborn. Not any danger that Mary Lincoln would
go wandering after dreams, visions, presences, such as were drifting
ever in a ghostly procession at the back of her husband's mind. There
was a danger in him that was to grow with the years, a danger that the
outer life might be swamped by the inner, that the ghosts within might
carry him away with them, away from fact--seeking-seeking. That this
never occurred may be fairly credited, or at least very plausibly
credited, to the firm-willed, the utterly matter-of-fact little person