g so fascinating to the imagination of man that we cannot
quite forego it, or accept any explanation which would compel us
altogether to part with it. The shuddering awe and terrible sense of
fate, which the grandeur of the Greek tragedies so powerfully expresses,
come to us when we contemplate this strange cloud which never left
Lincoln in any year after his earliest youth, although some traits in
his character seemed often incomprehensibly to violate it, and like
rebellious spirits to do outrage to it, while, in fact, they only made
it the more striking, picturesque, and mysterious. But, after all
explanations have been made, the conclusion must be that there is no one
and only thread to guide us through the labyrinth to the heart of this
singular trait, and each of us must follow that which his own nature
renders intelligible or congenial for him. To us, who know the awful
closing acts of his life-drama, it seems so appropriate that there
should be an impressive unity, and so an inevitable backward influence
working from the end towards the beginning, that we cannot avoid, nor
would avoid, an instinctive belief that an occult moral and mental
condition already existed in the years of Lincoln's life which we are
now observing, although the profound cause of that condition lay wholly
in the future, in the years which were still far away. There is a charm
in the very unreason and mysticism of such a faith, and mankind will
never quite fail to fancy, if not actually to believe, that the life
which Lincoln had to live in the future wrought in some inexplicable way
upon the life which he was living in the present. The explanation is not
more strange than the enigma.

Returning now to the narrative, an unpleasant necessity is encountered.
It must be confessed that the atmosphere of romance which lingers around
this love-tale of the fair and sweet Ann Rutledge, so untimely taken
away, is somewhat attenuated by the fact that only some fifteen months
rolled by after she was laid in the ground before Lincoln was again
intent upon matrimony. In the autumn of 1836 Miss Mary Owens, of
Kentucky, appeared in New Salem,--a comely lass, with "large blue eyes,"
"fine trimmings," and a long and varied list of attractions. Lincoln
immediately began to pay court to her, but in an ungainly and morbid
fashion. It is impossible to avoid feeling that his mind was not yet in
a natural and healthy condition. While offering to marry her, he advis