Page:Six Months at the White House.djvu/354

Rh "Such was Mr. Lincoln's will. On manners and such like things, he was pliable.  On questions of right and substance, he was as firm as a rock.  One of these classes of men look at Mr. Lincoln from the stand-point of things non-essential, and the other looks at him from the stand-point of substance, rejecting forms.  Hence the difference.  Mr. Lincoln was a man of firm, unyielding will, when, in human transactions, it was necessary to be so, and not otherwise.  At one moment Mr. Lincoln was as pliable and expansive as gentle air, and at the next moment he was biting, firm, tenacious, and unyielding as gravity itself.

"Thus I have traced Mr. Lincoln through his perceptions, his suggestiveness, his judgments, and his four great predominant qualities, namely,—his powers of reason, his great understanding, his conscience, and his heart. I assert that Mr. Lincoln lived in the head.  He loved the truth; he loved the eternal right and the good,—never yielding the fundamental conceptions of these to any man for any end.

"All the follies and wrong Mr. Lincoln ever fell into, or committed, sprang or came out of his weak points, namely, his want of quick, sagacious, intuitive judgment,—his want of quick, sagacious, intuitive knowledge of the play and meaning of the features of men as written on the face,—his tenderness and mercy, and, lastly, his utterly unsuspecting nature. He was deeply and seriously honest him-