Lincoln, the unknown

90 •LINCOLN THE UNKNOWNHerndon records in his biography:At the little country inns, we usually occupied the samebed. In most cases the beds were too short for Lincoln, andhis feet would hang over the footboard, thus exposing alimited expanse of shin bone. Placing a candle on a chairat the head of the bed, he would read and study for hours.I have known him to study in this position until twoo'clock in the morning. Meanwhile, I and others whochanced to occupy the same room would be safely andsoundly asleep. On the circuit in this way he studied Eucliduntil he could with ease demonstrate all the propositionsin the six books.After he had mastered geometry, he studied algebra, thenastronomy, then he prepared a lecture on the origin andgrowth of languages. But no other study interested him as didShakspere. The literary tastes that Jack Kelso had nurtured inNew Salem still persisted.The most striking characteristic of Abraham Lincoln, fromthis time on to the end of his life, was a sadness so profound, amelancholy so deep that mere words can hardly convey itsdepths.When Jesse Weik was helping Herndon prepare his immortalbiography, he felt that surely the reports of Lincoln'ssadness must be exaggerated. So he went and discussed thispoint at length with the men who had been associated with Lincolnfor years—men such as Stuart, Whitney, Matheny, Swett,and Judge Davis.Then Weik was firmly convinced "that men who never sawLincoln could scarcely realize his tendency to melancholy," andHerndon, agreeing with him, went farther, making the statementfrom which I have already quoted: "If Lincoln ever had a happyday in twenty years, I never knew of it. A perpetual look ofsadness was his most prominent feature. Melancholy drippedfrom him as he walked."When he was riding the circuit he would frequently sleepin the same room with two or three other attorneys. They wouldbe awakened early in the morning by the sound of his voice andfind him sitting on the edge of the bed, mumbling incoherentlyto himself. Getting up, he would start a fire and sit for hours,staring into the blaze. Frequently, on such occasions, he wouldrecite "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"Sometimes as he walked down the street, he was so deep ic