n A. Douglas, then a lobbyist, and said of
him: "He is the least man I ever saw." Lincoln's part seems to have been
rather that of an observer than of an actor. The account given is that
he was watching, learning, making acquaintances, prudently preparing for
future success, rather than endeavoring to seize it too greedily. In
fact, there is reason to believe that his thoughts were intent on far
other matter than the shaping of laws and statutes. For to this period
belongs the episode of Ann Rutledge. The two biographers whose personal
knowledge is the best regard this as the one real romance of Lincoln's
life. Heretofore he had held himself shyly aloof from women's society,
but this maiden won his heart. She comes before posterity amid a glamour
of rhetorical description, which attributes to her every grace of form
and feature, every charm of character and intellect. She was but a
schoolgirl of seventeen years when two men became her lovers; a year or
more afterward she became engaged to one of them, but before they could
be married he made a somewhat singular excuse for going to New York on
family affairs. His absence was prolonged and his letters became few.
People said that the girl had been deceived, and Lincoln began to hope
that the way was clearing for him. But under the prolonged strain Miss
Rutledge's health broke down, and on August 25, 1835, she died of brain
fever. Lincoln was allowed to see her as she lay near her end. The
effect upon him was grievous. Many declared him crazy, and his friends
feared that he might go so far as to take his own life; they watched him
closely, and one of them at last kindly took him away from the scene of
his sufferings for a while, and bore him constant and cheering company.
In time the cloud passed, but it seems certain that on only one or two
other occasions in his life did that deep melancholy, which formed a
permanent background to his temperament, take such overmastering, such
alarming and merciless possession of him. He was afflicted sorely with
a constitutional tendency to gloom, and the evil haunted him all his
life long. Like a dark fog-bank it hung, always dull and threatening, on
the verge of his horizon, sometimes rolling heavily down upon him,
sometimes drawing off into a more or less remote distance, but never
wholly disappearing. Every one saw it in his face and often felt it in
his manner, and few pictures of him have been made so bad as not in some
degree to pr