is "Address to the
Voters of Sangamon County" which was his first state paper, was as
direct, as free from bombast, as the greatest of his later achievements.
Almost any other youth who had as much of the sense of language as was
there exhibited, would have been led astray by the standards of the
hour, would have mounted the spread-eagle and flapped its wings in
rhetorical clamor. But Lincoln was not precocious. In art, as in
everything else, he progressed slowly; the literary part of him worked
its way into the matter-of-fact part of him with the gradualness of the
daylight through a shadowy wood. It was not constant in its development.
For many years it was little more than an irregular deepening of his
two original characteristics, taste and rhythm. His taste, fed on
Blackstone, Shakespeare, and the Bible, led him more and more exactingly
to say just what he meant, to eschew the wiles of decoration, to be
utterly non-rhetorical. His sense of rhythm, beginning simply, no more
at first than a good ear for the sound of words, deepened into
keen perception of the character of the word-march, of that extra
significance which is added to an idea by the way it conducts itself,
moving grandly or feebly as the case may be, from the unknown into the
known, and thence across a perilous horizon, into memory. On the basis
of these two characteristics he had acquired a style that was a rich
blend of simplicity, directness, candor, joined with a clearness beyond
praise, with a delightful cadence, having always a splendidly ordered
march of ideas.

But there was the third thing in which the earlier style of Lincoln's
was wanting. Marvelously apt for the purpose of the moment, his writings
previous to 1861 are vanishing from the world's memory. The more notable
writings of his later years have become classics. And the difference
does not turn on subject-matter. All the ideas of his late writings had
been formulated in the earlier. The difference is purely literary. The
earlier writings were keen, powerful, full of character, melodious,
impressive. The later writings have all these qualities, and in
addition, that constant power to awaken the imagination, to carry an
idea beyond its own horizon into a boundless world of imperishable
literary significance, which power in argumentative prose is beauty. And
how did Lincoln attain this? That he had been maturing from within the
power to do this, one is compelled by the analogy of his othe