One notable feature in all this quest is its submergence in the sea of things that surge up around the passing life, only to pass away themselves and disappear. His riddles and his quests, his ideals and delights are largely physical. His guide does not conduct him into the steadfast presence and observation of things permanent and spiritual. He is prone to make him roam in realms of magic, where forms and deeds are too thin and vague to be even shadows, and too false to be even artificial, but where yet each scene excites the imagination to perishing desires for joys of sense. Carnal potions, charms, and lust; physical tumults and delights so largely occupy the central place in all the scenes, that the riddles Faust would fain resolve are, to a large degree, the mysteries of the universe of sense. Now let any man compare the major problems in the mind of Goethe's Faust with the problems that Lincoln felt to be supreme. One discovers instantly a vast divergence. Themes and questions, that to the very end of Goethe's life perplexed and vexed his thought, were in Lincoln's writings not so much as named. But far beyond all this. The vast, unwieldly world of solid sense, so baffling, but so sure, now so terrible, and now so kind, now serving, and now crushing boastful, trembling man, now begetting, and now absorbing endless, countless generations and multitudes, seems not to constitute a vexing or perplexing theme in Lincoln's most insistent thought. This can never be explained as due to a painless, care-free, earthly lot; nor to a pampering environment; nor to physical stolidity; nor to incapacity for aesthetic joys. The lines that seamed his face, the muscles that leashed his frame, the structure of his hands, the meaning message upon his lips, his shadowed, sobered, brooding eyes attest a different tale. Lincoln was sufficiently aware of the plain and common sorrows incident to our earthly environment. He knew what havoc cold and heat, hunger and pain, toil and want, plague and death could visit upon our human life. But none of these things seemed to trouble him. So engrossed was he with questions he called "durable," that all physical discomforts and distresses, with their connected pleasures and desires and hopes and fears, were but passing, minor incidents. This undoubted fact in Lincoln's mental habitude is a signal and significant factor, to be held in careful estimation in a final judgment of Lincoln's character. Ethics, pure ethics, themes that dealt with realms where man is truly responsible and truly free, were his supreme concern from first to last. And so it comes to pass that the problem, which for him is truly fundamental and ultimate, passes wholly by at once all that burden of so-called evil, in the fear and hurt and mystery of things inflexible, and clings fast hold of things alone that are responsible and free.