l this wore upon her; she fell ill. At last her
condition became grave, then hopeless. Lincoln was sent for. Anne's last
hour was passed alone with him. She died at sunset, August 25, 1835. An
old neighbor who saw Lincoln just after his parting with the dying girl
says: "There were signs of the most terrible distress in his face. His
grief became frantic. He lost all self-control, even the consciousness
of his own identity; and his closest friends in New Salem pronounced him
insane, crazy, mad. They watched him with especial vigilance on dark and
stormy days. At such times he raved piteously, often saying, 'I can
never be reconciled to having the snow fall and the rain beat upon her
grave.'" His old friend, Bowlin Greene, alone seemed possessed of the
power to quiet him. He took him to his own home and kept him for several
weeks, an object of undisguised solicitude. At last it seemed safe to
permit him to return to his old haunts. Greene urged him to go back to
the law; and he did so, but he was never the same man again. He was
thin, haggard, and careworn. He was as one who had been at the brink of
the grave. A long time afterward, when the grass had for nearly thirty
years grown over the grave of Anne Rutledge, Lincoln was one day
introduced to a man named Rutledge in the White House. He looked at him
a moment, then grasped his hand and said with deep feeling: "I love the
name of Rutledge to this day. Anne was a lovely girl. She was natural,
well-educated. She would have made a good, loving wife. I did honestly
and truly love her, and I think often, often of her now." Mr. Herndon
has said that the love and the death of this young girl shattered
Lincoln's purposes and tendencies. "He threw off his infinite sorrow
only by leaping wildly into the political arena. He needed whip and spur
to save him from despair."

The period of Abraham Lincoln's boyhood and youth had closed when he
stood by the grave of Anne Rutledge. He had long been a man in stature.
He was now a man in years; yet the rough path he had been forced to
travel had made his progress toward maturity painfully slow. In spite
of his low birth, of his dire poverty, of the rudeness and illiteracy of
his associates, of the absence of refinement in his surroundings, of his
scanty means of education, of his homely figure and awkward manners, of
his coarse fare and shabby dress, he dared to believe there was an
exalted career in store for him. He hewed out the founda