|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: had a cheerful, wholesome, sunny nature, yet he had inherited the
strongest traits of the pioneers, and there was in him, moreover,
much of the poet, with a poet's great capacity for joy and pain.
It is not strange that as he developed into manhood, especially
when his deeper nature began to feel the stirrings of ambition
and of love, these seasons of depression and gloom came upon him
with overwhelming force.
During his childhood he had known few women, save his mother, and
that kind, God-fearing woman his stepmother, who did so much to
make his childhood hopeful and happy. No man ever honored women
more truly than did Abraham Lincoln; while all the qualities that
|
