No one who saw the two together that summer ever forgot it. Pioneer life was too often a sordid, barren thing, where men and women starved on bread alone. So Lincoln’s mother had dwindled to an early grave, lacking nourishment for the spirit. Courtship, even, was elemental, robbed of its hours of irresponsible idleness, its faery realm of romance. To see anyone rise above the hard, external facts of life touched the imagination of the dullest. In his public aspect a large part of Lincoln’s power, at this time, was that he expressed visibly community aspirations that still lay dormant and unrecognized. Now, he and Ann expressed the capacities of love of the disinherited. To the wondering, wistful eyes that regarded them, they seemed to have escaped to a fairer environment of their own making--of books, of dreams, of ambitions, of unimagined compatibilities. He borrowed Jack Kelso’s Burns and Shakespeare again, to read with Ann. Together they read of Mary, loved and lost; of Bonnie Doon, and Flow Gently, Sweet Afton, that plea to old mother-earth for tenderness for one gone beyond loving. With no prescience of disaster they read that old love tragedy of Verona. The young and happy can read these laments without sadness. They sound the depths of passion and the heights of consecration. They sing not only of dead loves, but of deathless love, and they contract the heart of youth with no fear of bereavement. Young love is always secure, thrice ringed around with protecting spells and enchantment; death an alien thing in some distant star. The banks of the Sangamon bloomed fresh and fair that golden summer, the meadow-lark sang unreproached, the flowing of the river accompanied only dreams of fuller life. They knew Italy for the first time, think of the wonder of it!--as something more than a pink peninsula in the geography--felt the soft air of moon-lit nights of love throb with the strain of the nightingale. There are no nightingales in America, but when he took the flat-boat down to New Orleans--Did she remember waving her kerchief from the bank? When the boat was tied up in a quiet Louisiana bayou one night, he heard the dropping-song of the mockingbird. That was like Juliet’s plea: “Oh love, remain!” What memories! What discoveries! What searching self-revelations by which youth leads love back through an uncompanioned past, finding there old experiences, trivial and forgotten until love touches and transforms them. Life suddenly becomes spacious and richly furnished. Lincoln’s old ties of affection were Ann’s now, dear and familiar; his old griefs. In tender retrospect she shared that tragic mystery of his childhood, his mother’s early death. And, like all the other women who ever belonged to him, she divined his greatness--had a glimpse of the path of glory already broadening from his feet.