Her beauty and her attractions and her early death made a very deep
impression upon him. We are told that he idealized her memory, and in
his recollections of her there was a poetry of sentiment, which might
possibly have been lessened, had she lived, by the prosaic realities of
life. With all his love of fun and frolic, with all his wit and humor,
with all his laughter and anecdotes, Lincoln, from his youth, was a man
of deep feeling. We have it on the authority of the most reliable of his
biographers, that he always associated with the memory of Anne Rutledge
the poem which, in his hours of despondency, he so often repeated:--
"Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a swift fleeting meteor, a fast flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.
"The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,
Be scattered around, and together be laid;
And the young and the old, and the low and the high,
Shall moulder to dust and together shall lie."
I never read this beautiful poem, so full of the true philosophy of
life, so suggestive of the rich promises of the hereafter, that I do not
think of the great president. He first found it in the columns of a
newspaper, cut it out, carried it in his pocket, and treasured it in his
memory for many years without knowing who was its author.
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