Lincoln's mind was unusually sound and sane and normal. He
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
caused men to like him--his strength, his ambition, his
kindliness--served equally to make him a favorite with them. In
the years of his young manhood three women greatly occupied his
thoughts. The first was the slender, fair-haired Ann Rutledge,
whom he very likely saw for the first time as she stood with the
group of mocking people on the river-bank, near her father's
mill, the day Lincoln's flatboat stuck on the dam at New Salem.
It was her death, two years before he went to live at
Springfield, that brought on the first attack of melancholy of
which we know, causing him such deep grief that for a time his
friends feared his sorrow might drive him insane.
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