“Good-morrow!” said the tiny spark,
But ere the morrow came ’twas dark.
So that’s the best that he can do,
In his own time say “How d’ye do.”
LINCOLN
THE STAR OF THE EAST BECOMES THE STAR OF THE WEST
XXXII. THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD
Next day, tramping to Flat Top Mountain, we talked of Springfield and Abraham Lincoln. We were in stately forests, and the ancient mould under the feet silenced our steps. We walked slowly, and stopped to pick the big black huckleberries, paused to climb over stricken trees, paused to eat the raspberries from the undergrowth of raspberry bushes.
“I’d like you to think of Lincoln as a poor man,” said Vachel, “an eccentric—laughed at, sneered at a great deal, entirely underestimated, a man who was a mystic, who believed in dreams and presentiments and told many dreams to his Cabinet with great gravity. Politicians want to see in him a conventional great man now, but in his life-time he was called eccentric. He was as much laughed at as Johnny Appleseed. But if a man is called eccentric in this country, or much laughed at, you’ll often find he was a mystic or a genius of some kind.”
One of Vachel’s alternative ideas for a tramp was to do a Springfield star, making the city our centre to radiate outward, or, could I say, walk radiantly outward, in one direction, then in another, all round the compass. “As you went to Bethlehem with the Russian pilgrims so you could pilgrimage to our Bethlehem,” said he, “see our star.”