CHAPTER VII. DREAMS AND PRESENTIMENTS. That "every man has within him his own Patmos," Victor Hugo was not far wrong in declaring. "Revery," says the great French thinker, "fixes its gaze upon the shadow until there issues from it light. Some power that is very high has ordained it thus." Mr. Lincoln had his Patmos, his "kinship with the shades;" and this is, perhaps, the strangest feature of his character. That his intellect was mighty and of exquisite mould, that it was of a severely logical cast, and that his reasoning powers were employed in the main on matters eminently practical, all men know who know anything about the real Lincoln. The father of modern philosophy tells us that "the master of superstition is the people; and in all superstitions wise men follow fools." Lord Bacon, however, was not unwilling to believe that storms might be dispersed by the ringing of bells,--a superstition that is not yet wholly dead, even in countries most distinguished by modern enlightenment. Those whom the great Englishman designated "masters of superstition,--fools," were the common people whose collective wisdom Mr. Lincoln esteemed above the highest gifts of cultured men. That the Patmos of the _plain people_, as Mr. Lincoln called them, was his in a large measure he freely acknowledged; and this peculiarity of his nature is shown in his strange dreams and presentiments, which sometimes elated and sometimes disturbed him in a very astonishing degree. From early youth he seemed conscious of a high mission. Long before his admission to the bar, or his entrance into politics, he believed that he was destined to rise to a great height; that from a lofty station to which he should be called he would be able to confer lasting benefits on his fellow-men. He believed also that from a lofty station he should fall. It was a vision of grandeur and of gloom which was confirmed in his mind by the dreams of his childhood, of his youthful days, and of his maturer years. The plain people with whom his life was spent, and with whom he was in cordial sympathy, believed also in the marvellous as revealed in presentiments and dreams; and so Mr. Lincoln drifted on through years of toil and exceptional hardship, struggling with a noble spirit for honest promotion,--meditative, aspiring, certain of his star, but appalled at times by its malignant aspect. Many times prior to his election to the Presidency he was both elated and alarmed by what seemed to him a rent in the veil which hides from mortal view what the future holds. He saw, or thought he saw, a vision of glory and of blood, himself the central figure in a scene which his fancy transformed from giddy enchantment to the most appalling tragedy.