Those with whom he was associated in his early youth and young manhood, and with whom he was always in cordial sympathy, were thorough believers in presentiments and dreams; and so Lincoln drifted on through years of toil and exceptional hardship—meditative, aspiring, certain of his star, but appalled at times by its malignant aspect. Many times prior to his first election to the Presidency he was both elated and alarmed by what seemed to him a rent in the veil which hides from mortal view what the future holds.
He saw, or thought he saw, a vision of glory and of blood, himself the central figure in a scene which his fancy transformed from giddy enchantment to the most appalling tragedy.
“WHY DON’T THEY COME!”
The suspense of the days when the capital was isolated, the expected troops not arriving, and an hourly attack feared, wore on Mr. Lincoln greatly.
“I begin to believe,” he said bitterly, one day, to some Massachusetts soldiers, “that there is no North. The Seventh Regiment is a myth. Rhode Island is another. You are the only real thing.”
And again, after pacing the floor of his deserted office for a half-hour, he was heard to exclaim to himself, in an anguished tone: “Why don’t they come! Why don’t they come!”
GRANT’S BRAND OF WHISKEY.
Lincoln was not a man of impulse, and did nothing upon the spur of the moment; action with him was the result of deliberation and study. He took nothing for granted; he judged men by their performances and not their speech.