The same year witnessed in Illinois the war of the giants for the vacant Senatorship. The two Anaks were the dike-breaker and one Abraham Lincoln, then forty-nine years old, whose various residences in different States, in Kentucky, his birthplace, in Indiana and Illinois, had taught him the value of the Union; and whose arm, sinewy with labor, and made more vigorous by his largely pumping heart, dealt blows which resounded sharply and broadly beyond the prairie fields which saw the encounter. A self-made man is too common an object in America to excite or deserve special attention; and most self-made men, so called, are distressingly selfish, unsymmetrical, and one-sided,—poor jobs abandoned by all creators but themselves. Even if they did not proclaim their self-structure to all, every one would at once recognize it by its disjointed architecture. Mr. Lincoln was an exception. More strictly speaking, he was rather a growth than a creation. In his steadily increasing gentle greatness, he reminds one of those slender rills which hesitatingly creep out from some modest, unvisited nook in the Alleghanies, noiselessly finds its way many unnoticed miles, until it begins to glint between cleared farmsteads, and swells slowly into a broad stream, whose brawny shoulders turn with ease mills and factories along its beneficent course. Then gathering volume, depth, and power, it upbears barges, into which whole districts have emptied their rich cornucopias, and pleasure-boats, gay with genial tourists; while along its great triumphal sea-ward march villages, towns, and cities clap their hands with admiring joy. Mr. Douglas is the same low-born rill, which soon, however, swells into the hurrying torrent, clattering over jagged rocks, between bold, mountain-ribbed canyons, jarring the earth with its audacious plunges, shaking defiantly its foamed way through gaps and rent gashes, until it hurls its massed waters over fields which it sweeps with disastrous grandeur. Although the popular vote in Illinois was in Mr. Lincoln’s favor, the legislative ballots were for his contestant. The new questions now illuminated newspapers, platforms, and domestic hearthstones. Bonfires, colored lights, and pyrotechnic displays of oratory soon lit up the whole Union, and through the varied flames ever interplayed the figure of the African.