dividuality and capacity for affairs. Time was his prime-minister,
and, we began to think, at one period, his general-in-chief also. At
first he was so slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence of
progress but in blowing up the engine; then he was so fast, that he
took the breath away from those who think there is no getting on safely
while there is a spark of fire under the boilers. God is the only being
who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize
occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr.
Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, though we have
sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, has always waited, as a
wise man should, till the right moment brought up all his reserves.
_Semper nocuit differre paratis_ is a sound axiom, but the really
efficacious man will also be sure to know when he is _not_ ready, and
be firm against all persuasion and reproach till he is.

One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on Mr.
Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree with him in principle, that
the chief object of a statesman should be rather to proclaim his
adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their triumph by quietly
accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe
politician than a conscientiously rigid _doctrinaire_, nothing more
sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits
of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular image of
an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the submissive destinies of
mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding necessity the toughest
facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we
commonly find that the men who control circumstances, as it is called,
are those who have learned to allow for the influence of their eddies,
and have the nerve to turn them to account at the happy instant. Mr.
Lincoln's perilous task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through
the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch
opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he did not
think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to
assure himself with his setting-pole where the main current was, and
keep steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we have faith
that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last.

A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel might be drawn between