When he brought it back, a sheaf of very admirable notes, but by no means great in quantity, I felt the charm of the material; the wild poetry of its reality was not unknown to me; I was at home with it, for I had known the belated backwoods of a certain region in Ohio; I had almost lived the pioneer life; and I wrote the little book with none of the reluctance I felt from studying its sources. I will not pretend that I had any prescience of the greatness, the tragical immortality, that underlay the few simple, mostly humble, facts brought to my hand. Those who see that unique historic figure in the retrospect will easily blame my youthful blindness, but those who only knew his life before he overtopped all the history of his time will not be so ready to censure me for my want of forecast. As it was, I felt the inadequacy of my work, and I regretted it in the preface which owned its hasty performance. There were several campaign lives of Lincoln which must have seemed better than mine to him; I cannot care now how it seemed to others; but what he thought of it I never knew. Within a few years I have heard that he annotated a copy of it, and that this copy is still somewhere extant in the West; but I am not certain that I should like to see it, much as my curiosity is concerning it. He might, he must, have said some things which could not console me for missing that great chance of my life when I was too young to know it. I saw him twice in Columbus, as I have told here already, and once in Washington, as I have told elsewhere. That was when I came from the office of his private secretaries at the White House, secure of my appointment as Consul at Venice, and lingered wistfully as he crossed my way through the corridor. Within no very long time past my old friend Piatt (he of the _Poems of Two Friends_) has told me that Lincoln then meant me to speak to him, as I might very fitly have done, in thanking him for my appointment, and that he had followed me out from the secretaries' room to let me do so. He might have had some faint promptings of curiosity concerning the queer youth who had written that life of him from material which he would not come to him for in person. But without doubting my friend, I doubt the fact; neither Hay nor Nicolay ever mentioned the matter to me in our many talks of Lincoln; and I cannot flatter myself that I missed another greatest chance of my life. Rather, I imagine that he did not know who I was, or could in the least care, under the burdens which then weighed upon him. He might have suspected me an office-seeker without the courage to approach him instead of the office-seeker whose hopes he had, very likely without vividly realizing it, crowned with joy. I blame myself for not speaking to him, of course, as I blame myself for not having gone to him instead of sending to him for the facts of his past; in any event, with my literary sense, I must have valued those facts;