His friend Speed became his salvation. Speed closed out his business and carried Lincoln off to visit his own relations in Kentucky. It was the devotion of Bowlin Green and his wife over again. But the psychology of the event was much more singular. Lincoln, in the inner life, had progressed a long way since the death of Ann, and the progress was mainly in the way of introspection, of self-analysis. He had begun to brood. As always, the change did not reveal itself until an event in the outward life called it forth like a rising ghost from the abyss of his silences. His friends had no suspicion that in his real self, beneath the thick disguise of his external sunniness, he was forever brooding, questioning, analyzing, searching after the hearts of things both within and without.. "In the winter of 1840 and 1841," writes Speed, "he was unhappy about the engagement to his wife--not being entirely satisfied that his heart was going with his hand. How much he suffered then on that account, none knew so well as myself; he disclosed his whole heart to me. In the summer of 1841 I became engaged to my wife. He was here on a visit when I courted her; and strange to say, something of the same feeling which I regarded as so foolish in him took possession of me, and kept me very unhappy from the time of my engagement until I was married. This will explain the deep interest he manifested in his letters on my account.... One thing is plainly discernible; if I had not been married and happy, far more happy than I ever expected to be, he would not have married." Whether or not Speed was entirely right in his final conclusion, it is plain that he and Lincoln were remarkably alike in temperament; that whatever had caused the break in Lincoln's engagement was repeated in his friend's experience when the latter reached a certain degree of emotional tension; that this paralleling of Lincoln's own experience in the experience of the friend so like himself, broke tip for once the solitude of his inner life and delivered him from some dire inward terror. Both men were deeply introspective. Each had that overpowering sense of the emotional responsibilities of marriage, which is bred in the bone of certain hyper-sensitive types--at least in the Anglo-Saxon race. But neither realized this trait in himself until, having blithely pursued his impulse to the point of committal, his spiritual conscience suddenly awakened and he asked of his heart, "Do I truly love her? Am I perfectly sure the emotion is permanent?"