Lincoln had the deepest cravings of love, of ambition, and of religion. His love brought him first to bereavement which shook his reason, then to the daily tragedy of an unhappy marriage. His ambition--he said when he entered his contest with Douglas--had proved "a failure, a flat failure." In his crude youth he exulted in the rejection of Christianity; then he felt the pressure of life's problems, and was powerless before them. He could believe only what was proved,--all beyond was a sad mystery. He bore himself for many years with honesty, kindness, humor, sadness, and infinite patience. He did not for a while rise to the perception of the highest truth in politics, but he was faithful to what he did see. He lived in closest contact with ordinary men and knew them thoroughly. His training was as a lawyer and a politician. This brought him in touch with the every-day actuality and all its hard and mean facts. He was disciplined in that attempt to reach justice under a code of laws which is the practical administration of society, distinct from the idealist's vision of perfection. The time came when in the new birth of politics he rose to the perception of a great moral principle,--the nation's duty toward slavery. At the same time, his ambition again saw its opportunity. He had a strong man's love of power, but he deliberately subordinated his personal success to his convictions when he risked and lost the fight with Douglas for the senatorship by the "house-divided-against-itself" speech. In the anxious interval between his election and inauguration, he went through, as he said long afterward, "a process of crystallization,"--a religious consecration. He made no talk about it, but all his words and acts thenceforth show a selfless, devoted temper. He bore incalculable burdens and perplexities for the sake of the people. He met the vast complication of forces which mix in politics and war--the selfishness, hatred, meanness, triviality, along with the higher elements--with the rarest union of shrewdness, flexibility, and steadfastness. His humor saved him from being crushed. The atmosphere he lived in permitted no illusions. "Politics," said he, "is the art of combining individual meannesses for the general good." He came to the sense of a divine purpose in which he had a part. He grew in charity, in sympathy, in wisdom. His private griefs, such as the death of his boy, deepened his nature. He bore burdens beyond Hamlet's,--a temperament prone to melancholy, the death of the woman he loved, a wife who was little comfort, an ambition which long found no fruition and no adequate field, a baffled gaze into life's mystery; then the responsibility of a nation in its supreme crisis, and the sense of the nation's woe. Through it all he held fast the clew of moral fidelity.