The Mystical Mood
"There was to me," says Henry B. Rankin, in his "Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln," "always an unapproachable grandeur in the man when he was in this mood of inner solitude. It isolated and—I always thought—exalted him above his ordinary life. History will discern and reverently disclose the strength in Lincoln's character and the executive foresight for which this mood gave him revealings."
And the Reverend Joseph Fort Newton adds to the sentiments of his friend Rankin these words: "Lincoln was a man whom to know was a kind of religion. His deep musings on the ways of God, on the souls of men, on the principles of justice and the laws of liberty bore fruit in exalted character and exact insight. Hence, a style of speech remarkable for its lucidity, direction, and forthright power, with no waste of words, tinged always by a temperament at once elusive and alluring, which Bryce compares to the weighty eloquence of Cromwell without its haziness."