“A blend of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears;
A quaint knight-errant of the pioneers;
A homely hero born of star and sod;
A Peasant Prince; a Masterpiece of God.”
Lincoln’s life has much more for American youth than the adventure-story of a backwoods boy of pioneer days on his unknown way to be a hero of American history. What Lincoln thought he was and what he made out of his relations with those around him are only incidental to the inspiring patience with which he kept the faith of high meaning within him, and the labor with which he strove on until his ideal came clear as one of the supreme visions of humanity.
Every really ambitious American boy asks himself the question, How did he do it? The probably correct answer is that he didn’t do it. He made himself the right man and the right people did it.
We do not now hear so much of Lincoln as the “fireplace” student, because that word no longer carries so pathetic a vision as it did to the American boy. “Lincoln the railsplitter” has almost disappeared from the phrases of patriotic eulogy for this great American, because the task and significance of railsplitting no longer bear the force of meaning that they did to the boys of Civil-War days. This means that, if the American boy is to receive any inspiration from the early life of Lincoln, there must be achieved some new and more significant form of interpretation from the making of his life and character.
Even the strong description of Edwin Markham becomes more figurative than concrete in its illustration more poetic than material, when he says,
“He built the rail-pile as he built the state,
Pouring his splendid strength through every blow,