Here we leave him for a while, in this peaceful and laborious period of his life; engaged in useful and congenial toil; surrounded by the love and respect of the entire community; in the fullness of his years and strength; the struggles of his youth, which were so easy to his active brain and his mighty muscles, all behind him, and the titanic labors of his manhood yet to come. We shall now try to sketch the beginnings of that tremendous controversy which he was in a few years to take up, to guide and direct to its wonderful and tragical close. CHAPTER XVIII THE BALANCE OF POWER We shall see in the course of the present work how the life of Abraham Lincoln divides itself into three principal periods, with corresponding stages of intellectual development: the first, of about forty years, ending with his term in Congress; the second, of about ten years, concluding with his final campaign of political speech- making in New York and in New England, shortly before the Presidential nominations of 1860; and the last, of about five years, terminating at his death. We have thus far traced his career through the first period of forty years. In the several stages of frontier experience through which he had passed, and which in the main but repeated the trials and vicissitudes of thousands of other boys and youths in the West, only so much individuality had been developed in him as brought him into the leading class of his contemporaries. He had risen from laborer to student, from clerk to lawyer, from politician to legislator. That he had lifted himself by healthy ambition and unaided industry out of the station of a farm-hand, whose routine life begins and ends in a backwoods log-cabin, to that representative character and authority which seated him in the national Capitol to aid in framing laws for his country, was already an achievement that may well be held to crown honorably a career of forty years.