No such memorable utterance rendered at the moment, or has rendered since, proper tribute to the aspects of Lincoln which on the whole have most touched the daily memories of his fellow-countrymen: his habit of humour and his habit of pardons. Everywhere in the North, but particularly on his own frontier, he was, even in 1865, reputed for his mirth—for his illuminating repartee and his swift, homely, pertinent apologues. Lincoln stories multiplied, many of them gathered year by year in tolerant volumes which paid no attention to any canon; and still others, often too indelicate for type, clustered about his name through their casual ascription to him by narrators who wanted the effect of his authority. Our folk-lore is permeated with anecdotes of this description. And side by side with them go other tales of a sentimental sort, tales of wives who went begging to him for the lives of their husbands under military sentence, and of plain, dull, sad old mothers who pled—never in vain by the popular records—for sons who had slept on sentry post almost in the face of the enemy. Of all folk-heroes Lincoln most strikingly unites a reputation for wit with a reputation for mercy. The American folk has done nothing more imaginative, and nothing more revealing, than to build up this tender, merry myth. In the hands of our newest poets, however, the myth is changing both outlines and dimensions. Lincoln’s laughter has lost something of its rusticity since we have ceased to live so close to frontier conditions. To Edwin Arlington Robinson, who has cut as in steel his conception of Lincoln the smiling god, the laconic Olympian, that laughter was only a cryptic mirth with which a sage met the rancour of blind gentlemen, sullen children who had to be taught what they could not understand until it should be too late to acknowledge that their master had after all been right and they pitifully wrong. The homespun mantle which Lincoln originally wore in the myth has entirely fallen away, as Mr. Robinson perceives him; and with it have gone both the buffoonery of so much of the popular tradition and the sentimental humanitarianism. What survives is the elemental, ancient matter of heroic genius and wisdom. By this sense of the cosmic elements which shaped his hero Mr. Robinson stands in the centre of the latest Lincoln cult, a cult which has the distinction of bringing the most revolutionary and most reactionary poets together to pay equal honours to the sole American whom they all agree to honour.