These curiously sad lines were chosen by Mr. Lincoln when he was a very young man to commemorate a grief which lay with continual heaviness on his heart, but to which he could not otherwise allude,--the death of Ann Rutledge, in whose grave Mr. Lincoln said that his heart lay buried. He muttered these verses as he rambled through the woods; he was heard to murmur them as he slipped into the village at nightfall; they came unbidden to his lips in all places, and very often in his later life. In the year of his nomination, he repeated them to some friends. When he had finished them, he said "they sounded to him as much like true poetry as anything that he had ever heard." The poem is now his; it is imperishably associated with his memory and interwoven with the history of his greatest sorrow. Mr. Lincoln's adoption of it has saved it from oblivion, and translated it from the "poet's corner" of the country newspaper to a place in the story of his own life. But enough has been given to show that Mr. Lincoln was as incapable of insulting the dead, in the manner credited to him in the Antietam episode, as he was of committing mean and unmanly outrages upon the living. If hypercritical and self-appointed judges are still disposed to award blame for anything that happened on that occasion, let their censure fall upon me, and not upon the memory of the illustrious dead, who was guiltless of wrong and without the shadow of blame for the part he bore in that misjudged affair. My own part in the incident, in the light of the facts here given, needs no apology. CHAPTER X. HIS LOVE OF CHILDREN. No sketch of Mr. Lincoln's character can be called complete which does not present him as he appeared at his own fireside, showing his love for his own children, his tenderness toward the little ones generally, and how in important emergencies he was influenced by them. A great writer has said that it were "better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked by children." So Mr. Lincoln firmly believed; and whenever it chanced that he gave offence to a child unwittingly he never rested until he had won back its favor and affection. He beheld in the face of a little child a record of innocence and love, of truth and trust; and in the society of children he was always happy.