In reverie and in dreams I have meditated long, searching for some satisfactory reason why that particular bloom was Lincoln's dear friend. Yet the reason, whatever it may be, matters not so much as the fact. Lincoln loved the lily and called it his friend. No mere sensuous admiration of beauty, this, but a deep sense of its spiritual significance. By its perfection the lily achieved personality, and that personality, so simple, so pure, so exquisite, struck a responsive chord in the heart of this man whom his cultured contemporaries called uncouth! On the plane of the spirit they met as friends. Great gifts have their price. From Lincoln's sensitive tenderness sprang the suffering which he bore, both in his early life and during the living martyrdom of his years in the White House. But as if to offset somewhat this terrible burden was added the divine gift of humor. It has been often remarked that humor and pathos are closely akin. The greatest humorists are also the greatest masters of pathos. Perhaps Mark Twain's greatest work was his _Joan of Arc_, which is almost wholly sad, a study in pathos, while _The Gilded Age_ makes its readers weep and laugh by turns. As in the expression so also in the source. When Lincoln with tender emphasis said to me that Artemus Ward's humor was largely "the result of a broken heart," he was but stating the law of nature that deep sorrow is as essential to humor as winter snows are to the bloom of spring. Charles Lamb's many griefs, and especially his sorrow over his insane sister, were the black soil from which his genius grew. Many of Josh Billings's ludicrous sayings were misspelled through his tears. The traceable outlines of tragedies in the early lives of writers like Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Bob Burdette, and Nasby testify to the rule that a sad night somewhere precedes the dawn of pure wit and inspiring humor. Burton in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ said, "If there is a hell on earth, it is to be found in the melancholy man's heart." But James Whitcomb Riley said that "wit in luxuriant growth is ever the product of soil richly fertilized by sorrow." As for Lincoln, his first love died of a broken heart; he lived on with one. "Cheer up, Abe! Cheer up!" was the hourly advice of the sympathetic pioneers among whom he lived. But the sorrowing stranger was, after all, friendless, and he could not cheer up alone. He was an orphan, homeless; he had no sister, no brother, no wife to soothe, advise, or caress him. The floods of sorrow had swallowed him up and he struggled alone. Few, indeed, are the men or women who have descended so deep and endured to remember it. Down into the darkness came faint voices saying over and over, "Cheer up, Abe!" If he could muster the courage to do as they said, he would be saved from death or the insane asylum, which is more dreaded than the grave. Nothing but cheer could be of any use.