Lincoln was one of those men who require some mighty crisis to call their genius forth. Though more successful than Grant in ordinary life, he was never regarded as a national figure in law or politics till he had passed his fiftieth year. He had no advantages of birth; though he came of a sturdy old English stock that emigrated from Norfolk to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and though his mother seems to have been, both intellectually and otherwise, above the general run of the Kentuckians among whom he was born in 1809. His educational advantages were still less. Yet he soon found his true affinities in books, as afterwards in life, not among the clever, smart, or sentimental, but among the simple and the great. He read and reread Shakespeare and the Bible, not because they were the merely proper things to read but because his spirit was akin to theirs. This meant that he never was a bookworm. Words were things of life to him; and, for that reason, his own words live. He had no artificial graces to soften the uncouth appearance of his huge, gaunt six-foot-four of powerful bone and muscle. But he had the native dignity of straightforward manhood; and, though a champion competitor in feats of strength, his opinion was always sought as that of an impartial umpire, even in cases affecting himself. He "played the game" in his frontier home as he afterwards played the greater game of life-or-death at Washington. His rough-hewn, strong-featured face, shaped by his kindly humor to the finer ends of power, was lit by a steady gaze that saw yet looked beyond, till the immediate parts of the subject appeared in due relation to the whole. Like many another man who sees farther and feels more deeply than the rest, and who has the saving grace of humor, he knew what yearning melancholy was; yet kept the springs of action tense and strong. Firm as a rock on essentials he was extremely tolerant about all minor differences. His policy was to live and let live whenever that was possible. The preservation of the Union was his master-passion, and he was ready for any honorable compromise that left the Union safe. Himself a teetotaller, he silenced a temperance delegation whose members were accusing Grant of drunkenness by saying he should like to send some of his other generals a keg of the same whisky if it would only make them fight.