After this Mr. Lincoln became unusually cheerful. In the afternoon he ordered a carriage for a drive. Mrs. Lincoln asked him if he wished any one to accompany them. "No, Mary," said he, "I prefer that we ride by ourselves to-day." Mrs. Lincoln said afterwards that she never saw him look happier than he did during that drive. In reply to a remark of hers to that effect, Mr. Lincoln said: "And well may I feel so, Mary; for I consider that this day the war has come to a close. Now, we must try to be more cheerful in the future; for between this terrible war and the loss of our darling son we have suffered much misery. Let us both try to be happy." On the night of the fatal 14th of April, 1865, when the President was assassinated, Mrs. Lincoln's first exclamation was, "His dream was prophetic." History will record no censure against Mr. Lincoln for believing, like the first Napoleon, that he was a man of destiny; for such he surely was, if the term is at all admissible in a philosophic sense. And our estimate of his greatness must be heightened by conceding the fact that he was a believer in certain phases of the supernatural. Assured as he undoubtedly was by omens which to his mind were conclusive that he would rise to greatness and power, he was as firmly convinced by the same tokens that he would be suddenly cut off at the height of his career and the fulness of his fame. He always believed that he would fall by the hand of an assassin; and yet with that appalling doom clouding his life,--a doom fixed and irreversible, as he was firmly convinced,--his courage never for a moment forsook him, even in the most trying emergencies. Can greatness, courage, constancy in the pursuit of exalted aims, be tried by a severer test? He believed with Tennyson that-- "Because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence." Concerning presentiments and dreams Mr. Lincoln had a philosophy of his own, which, strange as it may appear, was in perfect harmony with his character in all other respects. He was no dabbler in divination,--astrology, horoscopy, prophecy, ghostly lore, or witcheries of any sort. With Goethe, he held that "Nature cannot but do right eternally." Dreams and presentiments, in his judgment, are not of supernatural origin; that is, they proceed in natural order, their essence being preternatural, but not _above_ Nature. The moving power of dreams and visions of an extraordinary character he ascribed, as did the Patriarchs of old, to the Almighty Intelligence that governs the universe, their processes conforming strictly to natural laws. "Nature," said he, "is the workmanship of the Almighty; and we form but links in the general chain of intellectual and material life."