towns and
wayside places; and in a curious and almost creepy fashion the great
presence of Abraham Lincoln continually grew upon me. I think it is
necessary to linger a little in America, and especially in what many
would call the most uninteresting or unpleasing parts of America,
before this strong sense of a strange kind of greatness can grow upon
the soul. . . . The externals of the Middle West affect an Englishman
as ugly, and yet ugliness is not exactly the point. There are things
in England that are quite as ugly or even uglier. Rows of red brick
villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would
suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure.
But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way,
compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or
smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in
a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as
ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its
worthy objects have around them a sort of halo of refuse. Somebody
said of the rugged and sardonic Dr. Temple, once Archbishop of
Canterbury: "There are no polished corners in our Temple."

. . . there are no polished corners even in the great American
cities, which are full of fine and stately classical buildings, not
unworthy to be compared to temples. Nobody seems to mind the
juxtaposition of unsightly things and important things. There is some
deep difference of feeling about the need for completeness and
harmony, and there is the same thing in the political and ethical
life of the great Western nation. It was out of this landscape that
the great President came, and one might almost trace a fanciful
shadow of his figure in the thin trees and the stiff wooden pillars.
A man of any imagination might look down these strange streets, with
their frame-houses filled with the latest conveniences and surrounded
with the latest litter, till he could see approaching down the long
perspective that long ungainly figure, with the preposterous
stove-pipe hat and the rustic umbrella and deep melancholy eyes, the
humour and the hard patience and the heart that fed upon hope
deferred.

That is admiring Abraham Lincoln, and that is admiring America.*

[* Ibid., pp. 168-170.]

Among the "stately and classical buildings"