[From the Same.]
Not enough attention has been paid to the marked difference between the situation and possibilities of a life developed here in the West, during the first half of the present century, and those of a life nurtured and cultivated in an old and settled community like that of New England.
Consider, for example, the measureless difference between the early surroundings of John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln. Both were possessed of great natural endowments. Adams was blessed with parents whose native force of character, and whose vigorous and thorough culture have never been surpassed by any married pair in America. Young Adams was thoroughly taught by his mother until he had completed his tenth year; and then, accompanying his father to France, he spent two years in a training-school at Paris and three years in the University at Leyden. After two years of diplomatic service, under the skilful guidance of his father's hand, he returned to America, and devoted three years to study at Harvard, where he was graduated at the age of twenty-one; and, three years later, was graduated in the law, under the foremost jurist of his time. With such parentage and such opportunities, who can wonder that by the time he reached the meridian of his life, he was a man of immense erudition, and had honored every great office in the gift of his country?
How startling the contrast, in every particular, between his early life and that of Abraham Lincoln.... Born to an inheritance of the extremest poverty, wholly unaided by his parents, surrounded by the rude forces of the wilderness, only one year at any school, never for a day master of his own time until he reached his majority, forcing his way to the profession of the law by the hardest and roughest road, and beginning its practice at twenty-eight years of age, yet, by the force of unconquerable will and persistent hard work, he attained a foremost place in his profession.
"And, moving up from high to higher,
Became, on fortune's crowning slope,
The pillar of a people's hope,
The centre of a world's desire."