How still Lincoln became after his nomination for President in 1860! A note of acceptance, just twenty-three lines long, and then unbroken silence till the end of the campaign. He had thundered throughout the country against the Christless creed of slavery until men forgot his crude manners, preposterous figure and shrill, piping voice in admiration and reverence of his noble qualities. Now the crooked mouth was set hard. He retired to his modest home in Springfield, Illinois. Nor could threats or persuasions induce him to address a word to the public during that terrific campaign which was the prelude to the horrors of civil war. In the upward reachings of Lincoln’s life there was a singular mysticism that sometimes startles one who contemplates the imperishable grandeur of his place in history. He saw omens in dreams; experimented with the ghostly world of spiritualism; half-surrendered to madness, when his personal affections were attacked; predicted a violent death for himself; dreamed of his own assassination, and discussed the matter seriously; and gave evidence many times of a strange, aberrant emotional exaltation, alternated with brooding sadness or hilarious, uncontrollable merriment. But behind these mere eccentricities were sanity, conscience, strength and far-seeing penetrativeness. In the midst of his heroic debate on slavery with Douglas in 1858, while the whole nation watched the exciting struggle, he showed his statesmanlike appreciation of the situation when he said: “I am after larger game; the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this.” And when he was nominated in the roaring Chicago Convention, where the foremost politicians of the East actually shed tears over the defeat of William H. Seward, he let his party do the shouting, promising, denouncing and hurrahing, while he--wiser, cooler, abler than all--stood squarely on his record and his party’s platform, without apology, explanation or mitigation. To his mind the issue was simple. It could not be misunderstood. Slavery was immoral. It must be confined to the slave States, where it had a constitutional sanction, but uncompromisingly kept out of the free territories. Yet the country rang with threats that the slave States would break up the Union if Lincoln was elected. He had declared that the nation could not endure half slave and half free. That, they insisted, was a declaration of war against the slave States. Lincoln drew the short gray shawl about his stooped shoulders, and his face grew more sorrowful. But he said nothing. Not many months before he had written a letter to a Jefferson birthday festival in Boston, in which he flung the name of Jefferson against the Democrats as Douglas hurled the heart of Bruce into the ranks of the heathen: “The Democracy of to-day holds the _liberty_ of one man to be absolutely nothing when in conflict with another man’s right of _property_.