ue eyes, fair
complexion. She was pretty, slightly slender, but in everything a
good-hearted young woman. She was about five feet two inches high, and
weighed in the neighbourhood of a hundred and twenty pounds. She was
beloved by all who knew her. She died as it were of grief. In
speaking of her death and her grave Lincoln once said to me, 'My heart
lies buried there.'" The poor girl, when Lincoln first came courting
to her, had passed through a grievous agitation. She had been engaged
to a young man, who suddenly returned to his home in the Eastern
States, after revealing to her, with some explanation which was more
convincing to her than to her friends, that he had been passing under
an assumed name. It seems that his absence was strangely prolonged,
that for a long time she did not hear from him, that his letters when
they did come puzzled her, that she clung to him long, but yielded at
last to her friends, who urged their very natural suspicions upon her.
It is further suggested that there was some good explanation of his
conduct all the while, and that she learnt this too late when actually
engaged to Lincoln. However that may be, shortly after her engagement
to Lincoln she fell seriously ill, insisted, as she lay ill, on a long
interview with Lincoln alone, and a day or two later died. This was in
1835, when he was twenty-six. It is perhaps right to say that one
biographer throws doubt on the significance of this story in Lincoln's
life. The details as to Ann Rutledge's earlier lover are vague and
uncertain. The main facts of Lincoln's first engagement and almost
immediate loss of his betrothed are quite certain; the blow would have
been staggering enough to any ordinary young lover and we know nothing
of Lincoln which would discredit Mr. Herndon's judgment that its effect
on him was both acute and permanent. There can be no real doubt that
his spells of melancholy were ever afterwards more intense, and politer
biographers should not have suppressed the testimony that for a time
that melancholy seemed to his friends to verge upon insanity. He
always found good friends, and, as was to happen again later, one of
them, Mr. Bowline Greene, carried him off to his own secluded home and
watched him carefully. He said "the thought that the snows and rains
fell upon her grave filled him with indescribable grief." Two years
later he told a fellow-legislator that "although he seemed to others to
enjoy life r