The inner life of Abraham Lincoln : $b Six months at the White HouseCarpenter, F. B. (Francis Bicknell)
History
The inner life of Abraham Lincoln : $b Six months at the White House
Carpenter, F. B. (Francis Bicknell)
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Anecdotes; Presidents -- United States -- Anecdotes
“Mr. Lincoln’s head was long and tall from the base of the brain and
from the eyebrows. His head ran backwards, his forehead rising as it
ran back at a low angle, like Clay’s, and, unlike Webster’s, almost
perpendicular. The size of his hat, measured at the hatter’s block,
was 7⅛, his head being, from ear to ear, 6½ inches, and from the front
to the back of the brain 8 inches. Thus measured, it was not below
the medium size. His forehead was narrow but high; his hair was dark,
almost black, and lay floating where his fingers or the winds left it,
piled up at random. His cheek-bones were high, sharp, and prominent;
his eyebrows heavy and prominent; his jaws were long, upcurved, and
heavy; his nose was large, long, and blunt, a little awry towards the
right eye; his chin was long, sharp, and upcurved; his eyebrows cropped
out like a huge rock on the brow of a hill; his face was long, sallow,
and cadaverous, shrunk, shrivelled, wrinkled, and dry, having here and
there a hair on the surface; his cheeks were leathery; his ears were
large, and ran out almost at right angles from his head, caused partly
by heavy hats and partly by nature; his lower lip was thick, hanging,
and undercurved, while his chin reached for the lip upcurved; his neck
was neat and trim, his head being well balanced on it; there was the
lone mole on the right cheek, and Adam’s apple on his throat.
“Thus stood, walked, acted, and looked Abraham Lincoln. He was not a
pretty man by any means, nor was he an ugly one; he was a homely man,
careless of his looks, plain-looking and plain-acting. He had no pomp,
display, or dignity, so-called. He appeared simple in his carriage and
bearing. He was a sad-looking man; his melancholy dripped from him
as he walked. His apparent gloom impressed his friends, and created
a sympathy for him,--one means of his great success. He was gloomy,
abstracted, and joyous,--rather humorous,--by turns. I do not think he
knew what real joy was for many years.
“Mr. Lincoln sometimes walked our streets cheerily,--good-humoredly,
perhaps joyously,--and then it was, on meeting a friend, he cried ‘How
d’ y?’ clasping one of his friend’s hands in both of his, giving a good
hearty soul-welcome. Of a winter’s morning, he might be seen stalking
and stilting it towards the market-house, basket on arm, his old gray
shawl wrapped around his neck, his little Willie or Tad running along
at his heels, asking a thousand little quick questions, which his
father heard not, not even then knowing that little Willie or Tad
was there, so abstracted was he. When he thus met a friend, he said
that something put him in mind of a story which he heard in Indiana or
elsewhere, and tell it he would, and there was no alternative but to
listen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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