new capital, and made, as his friends and neighbors declared, a
brilliant marriage.



IV. CONGRESSMAN LINCOLN

Hopeful and cheerful as he ordinarily seemed, there was in Mr.
Lincoln's disposition a strain of deep melancholy. This was not
peculiar to him alone, for the pioneers as a race were somber
rather than gay. Their lives had been passed for generations
under the most trying physical conditions, near malaria-infested
streams, and where they breathed the poison of decaying
vegetation. Insufficient shelter, storms, the cold of winter,
savage enemies, and the cruel labor that killed off all but the
hardiest of them, had at the same time killed the happy-go-lucky
gaiety of an easier form of life. They were thoughtful, watchful,
wary; capable indeed of wild merriment: but it has been said that
although a pioneer might laugh, he could not easily be made to
smile. 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