In this way Abraham Lincoln met and passed through one of the most important crises of his life. There was so much of idiosyncrasy in it that it has been, and will continue to be for years to come, the occasion of endless gossip in Sangamon County and elsewhere. Because it was not precisely like the experience of other people, who are married and given in marriage every day without any ado, a dozen conflicting stories have grown up, more or less false and injurious to both contracting parties. But it may not be fanciful to suppose that characters like that of Lincoln, elected for great conflicts and trials, are fashioned by different processes from those of ordinary men, and pass their stated ordeals in a different way. By circumstances which seem commonplace enough to commonplace people, he was thrown for more than a year into a sea of perplexities and sufferings beyond the reach of the common run of souls. It is as useless as it would be indelicate to seek to penetrate in detail the incidents and special causes which produced in his mind this darkness as of the valley of the shadow of death. There was probably nothing worth recording in them; we are only concerned with their effect upon a character which was to be hereafter for all time one of the possessions of the nation. It is enough for us to know that a great trouble came upon him, and that he bore it nobly after his kind. That the manner in which he confronted this crisis was strangely different from that of most men in similar circumstances need surely occasion no surprise. Neither in this nor in other matters was he shaped in the average mold of his contemporaries. In many respects he was doomed to a certain loneliness of excellence. There are few men that have had his stern and tyrannous sense of duty, his womanly tenderness of heart, his wakeful and inflexible conscience, which was so easy towards others and so merciless towards himself. Therefore when the time came for all of these qualities at once to be put to the most strenuous proof, the whole course of his development and the tendency of his nature made it inevitable that his suffering should be of the keenest and his final triumph over himself should be of the most complete and signal character. In that struggle his youth of reveries and day-dreams passed away. Such furnace-blasts of proof, such pangs of transformation, seem necessary for exceptional natures. The bread eaten in tears, of which Goethe speaks, the sleepless nights of sorrow, are required for a clear vision of the celestial powers. Fortunately the same qualities that occasion the conflict insure the victory also. From days of gloom and depression, such as we have been considering, no doubt came precious results in the way of sympathy, self-restraint, and that sober reliance on the final triumph of good over evil peculiar to those who have been greatly tried but not destroyed. The late but splendid maturity of Lincoln's mind and