as with
correspondence and slow talk and silences to draw out a friendship. Yet
he was not cold or mean, but capable of hero-worship, following with
ardor the careers of great conquerors like Caesar and Napoleon, and
capable, too, of loyalty to party and to men. He had great personal
magnetism: young men, especially, he charmed and held as no other public
man could, now Clay was dead. His habits were convivial, and the
vicious indulgence of his strong and masculine appetites, the only
relaxation he craved in the intervals of his fierce activities, had
caused him frequent illnesses; but he was still a young man, even by
American standards, for the eminence he had attained. At the full of his
extraordinary powers, battling for the high place he had and the higher
he aspired to, there was nowhere to be seen his equal as a debater or a
politician,--nowhere but in the ungainly figure, now once more erected
into a posture of rivalry and defiance, of the man whom he had long ago
outstripped and left behind him in the home of their common beginnings.

Slower of growth, and devoid altogether of many brilliant qualities
which his rival possessed, Lincoln nevertheless outreached him by the
measure of the two gifts the other lacked: the twin gifts of humor and
of brooding melancholy. Bottomed by the one in homeliness, his character
was by the other drawn upward to the height of human nobility and
aspiration. His great capacity of pain, which but for his buffoonery
would no doubt have made him mad, was the source of his rarest
excellencies. Familiar with squalor, and hospitable to vulgarity, his
mind was yet tenanted by sorrow, a place of midnight wrestlings. In him,
as never before in any other man, were high and low things mated, and
awkwardness and ungainliness and uncouthness justified in their uses. At
once coarser than his rival and infinitely more refined and gentle, he
had mastered lessons which the other had never found the need of
learning, or else had learned too readily and then dismissed. He had
thoroughness for the other's competence; insight into human nature, and
a vast sympathy, for the other's facile handling of men; a deep devotion
to the right for the other's loyalty to party platforms. The very core
of his nature was truth, and he himself is reported to have said of
Douglas that he cared less for the truth, as the truth, than any other
man he knew.

Hanging for some years upon the heels of his rival's rapid asc