That there was also a simple prosaic physical inducement cannot be
denied. Hardship and daily discomfort in all the arrangements of life
counted for something, and especially so the bad food, greasy,
unwholesome, horribly cooked, enough to afflict an ostrich with the blue
devils of dyspepsia. The denizen of the town devoured messes vastly
worse than the simple meal of the hunter and trapper, and did not
counteract the ill effect by hard exercise in the free, inspiring air.
Such facts must be considered, though they diminish the poetry which
rhetoricians and sentimentalists have cast over the melancholy of
Lincoln's temperament. Yet they fall far short of wholly accounting for
a gloom which many have loved to attribute to the mysticism of a great
destiny, as though the awful weight of his immense task was making
itself felt in his strange, brooding nature long years before any human
prophet could have forecast any part of that which was to come. In this
apparent vague consciousness of the oppression of a great burden of
toil, duty, and responsibility, casting its shadow so far before, there
is something so fascinating to the imagination of man that we cannot
quite forego it, or accept any explanation which would compel us
altogether to part with it. The shuddering awe and terrible sense of
fate, which the grandeur of the Greek tragedies so powerfully expresses,
come to us when we contemplate this strange cloud which never left
Lincoln in any year after his earliest youth, although some traits in
his character seemed often incomprehensibly to violate it, and like
rebellious spirits to do outrage to it, while, in fact, they only made
it the more striking, picturesque, and mysterious.
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