m,
irritated him until solved. Even in his Gentryville days his comrades
noted that he was constantly searching for reasons and that he
"explained so clearly." This characteristic became stronger with
years. He was unwilling to pronounce himself on any subject until he
understood it, and he could not let it alone until he had reached a
conclusion which satisfied him.

This seeing clearly became a splendid force in Lincoln; because when
he once had reached a conclusion he had the honesty of soul to suit
his actions to it. No consideration could induce him to abandon the
course his reason told him was logical. Not that he was obstinate
and having taken a position, would not change it if he saw on further
study that he was wrong. In his first circular to the people of
Sangamon County is this characteristic passage: "Upon the subjects I
have treated, I have spoken as I thought. I may be wrong in any or
all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only
sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I
discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce
them."

Joined to these strong mental and moral qualities was that power of
immediate action which so often explains why one man succeeds in life
while another of equal intelligence and uprightness fails. As soon
as Lincoln saw a thing to do he did it. He wants to know; here is a
book--it may be a biography, a volume of dry statutes, a collection of
verse; no matter, he reads and ponders it until he has absorbed all it
has for him. He is eager to see the world; a man offers him a position
as a "hand" on a Mississippi flatboat; he takes it without a moment's
hesitation over the toil and exposure it demands. John Calhoun
is willing to make him a deputy surveyor; he knows nothing of the
science; in six weeks he has learned enough to begin his labors.
Sangamon County must have representatives, why not he? and his
circular goes out. Ambition alone will not explain this power of
instantaneous action. It comes largely from that active imagination
which, when a new relation or position opens, seizes on all its
possibilities and from them creates a situation so real that one
enters with confidence upon what seems to the unimaginative the
rashest undertaking. Lincoln saw the possibilities in things and
immediately appropriated them.

But the position he filled in Sangamon County in 1835 was not all
due to these qualities; much was due