Lincoln lacked some of the finer feelings. He combined a deep personal sympathy for anything which he could visualize with a rather strange mental obtuseness toward things remote or abstract. Darwin, who was born in the same year, had an early love of poetry and music. How these tastes became atrophied in his concentration of thought upon matters relating to the natural sciences was confessed and mourned by him, and has often been commented upon by others. The time came to him when music and poetry gave him physical nausea. Lincoln never had an appreciation or love of anything very fine either in poetry or music. At a time when he was being considered for President he could sit in a stage coach playing "Yankee Doodle" on the mouth-organ[55] and playing it badly, but he had no fine musical or poetic taste. Not long before his assassination his sister-in-law, Mrs. Edwards, visited at the White House, and he accompanied her one evening to the conservatory. She greatly admired the rare exotics which she there beheld for the first time, and Lincoln vainly strove to share her enthusiasm but confessed to her that something had been left out of his nature. Such things seemed to make no appeal to him. Of Lincoln's lack in matters involving the finer feelings we have abundant testimony not only in the pages of Lamon and Herndon, but in other intimate sketches of his life in Illinois, as, for example, in Whitney's _With Lincoln on the Circuit_,[56] and especially in his article in the _Arena_ in April, 1898. There were aspects of religion which did not make as strong an appeal to Abraham Lincoln as they would have made but for this blind spot in his nature. It is not the purpose of this book to go in any detail into Mr. Lincoln's love affairs; but if any further illustration were desired of this point of which we are speaking, it could be found very painfully in his relations with Miss Owens, and his letter to Mrs. Browning. Reference has been made to a certain lack of good taste which Lincoln sometimes manifested, and of which the reminiscences of Lamon, Herndon, Whitney, and others of his associates have given us sufficient example. But it was not always so with Lincoln. There was in him an innate courtesy, an intuitive sympathy, an ability to adapt himself to another's point of view, which gave him the essential quality of a gentleman. Fred Douglass said of him that Mr. Lincoln was the only white man with whom he ever talked for an hour who did not in some way remind him that he was a negro. That same fine feeling showed itself in many ways.