The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3. Various
years which Mr. Lincoln passed in Springfield were the preparatory years of his future greatness. From this time onward he was ever a busy man.
He was once associated with Mr. Swett in defending a man accused of murder. He listened to the testimony which witness after witness gave against his client until his honest heart could stand it no longer; then, turning to his associate, he said: "Swett, the man is guilty; you defend him: I can't." Swett did defend him, and the man was acquitted. When proffered his share of the large fee Lincoln most emphatically declined it, on the ground that "all of it belonged to Mr. Swett, whose ardor and eloquence saved a guilty man from justice."
At another time, when a would-be client had stated the facts of his case, Mr. Lincoln replied: "Yes; there is no reasonable doubt but I can gain your case for you. I can set a whole neighborhood at loggerheads. I can distress a widowed mother and her six fatherless children, and thereby get for you $600, which rightfully belongs, it seems to me, as much to the woman and her children as it does to you. You must remember that some things that are legally right are not morally right. I shall not take your case, but will give you a little advice, for which I will charge you nothing. You appear to be a sprightly, energetic man: I would advise you to try your hand at making $600 some other way."
I turn now to another phase of his nature, and recall that he had not grown up to manhood without the usual experiences of the tender passion. It was while he was yet living at New Salem that his heart opened to a fair, sweet-tempered, and intelligent girl, with the romantic name of Anne Rutledge. They were engaged to be married as soon as he should be admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court. But in August, 1835, she died. Her beauty and her attractions and her early death made a very deep impression upon him. We are told that he idealized her memory, and in his recollections of her there was a poetry of sentiment, which might possibly have been lessened, had she lived, by the prosaic realities of life. With all his love of fun and frolic, with all his wit and humor, with all his laughter and anecdotes, Lincoln, from his youth, was a man of deep feeling. We have it on the authority of the most reliable of his biographers, that he always associated with the memory of Anne Rutledge the poem which, in his hours of despondency, he so often repeated:—
"Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a swift fleeting meteor, a fast flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.
"The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,
Be scattered around, and together be laid;
And the young and the old, and the low and the high,
Shall moulder to dust and together shall lie."
I never read this beautiful poem, so full of the true philosophy of life, so suggestive of the rich promises of the hereafter, that I do not think of the great president. He first found it in the columns of a newspaper, cut it out, carried it in his pocket, and treasured it in his memory for many years without knowing who was its author.
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