development of two characteristics and by the lack of a third. The two
that he possessed were taste and rhythm. At the start he was free from
the prevalent vice of his time, rhetoricality. His "Address to the
Voters of Sangamon County" which was his first state paper, was as
direct, as free from bombast, as the greatest of his later achievements.
Almost any other youth who had as much of the sense of language as was
there exhibited, would have been led astray by the standards of the
hour, would have mounted the spread-eagle and flapped its wings in
rhetorical clamor. But Lincoln was not precocious. In art, as in
everything else, he progressed slowly; the literary part of him worked
its way into the matter-of-fact part of him with the gradualness of the
daylight through a shadowy wood. It was not constant in its development.
For many years it was little more than an irregular deepening of his
two original characteristics, taste and rhythm. His taste, fed on
Blackstone, Shakespeare, and the Bible, led him more and more exactingly
to say just what he meant, to eschew the wiles of decoration, to be
utterly non-rhetorical. His sense of rhythm, beginning simply, no more
at first than a good ear for the sound of words, deepened into
keen perception of the character of the word-march, of that extra
significance which is added to an idea by the way it conducts itself,
moving grandly or feebly as the case may be, from the unknown into the
known, and thence across a perilous horizon, into memory. On the basis
of these two characteristics he had acquired a style that was a rich
blend of simplicity, directness, candor, joined with a clearness beyond
praise, with a delightful cadence, having always a splendidly ordered
march of ideas.

But there was the third thing in which the earlier style of Lincoln's
was wanting. Marvelously apt for the purpose of the moment, his writings
previous to 1861 are vanishing from the world's memory. The more notable