I begin to wonder about my Reverdy. At the school I see him in association with English boys. He is not so strong as they, not so handsome, not so alert and apt. Isabel has never had a child and wants one with consuming passion. This boy is mine, but am I better off than Isabel? My life grows clearer to me. I have receded from it and can see it better. I can look out upon Rome and then close my eyes and recall Chicago. I think of my long years of money making; then I turn to reflection upon art and life. I thrill in the presence of Isabel; then I remember the mild but tender passion which Dorothy aroused in me.

I thrill before Isabel, but I give my feelings no expression. There are looks, no doubt, hesitations of speech, flutterings of the heart, that she may hear. But she is encompassed with flame that bars my way. I do not try to pass. We are all friends together, Isabel, Uncle Tom, and I. No plans are made which exclude Uncle Tom. Isabel and I have no secrets, no stealings away, no intimacies however slight, no quick withdrawals upon the sound of his step. Everything is known to Uncle Tom. I had impulses to all clearness of conduct in the circumstance that Uncle Tom is so much my friend. He treats me like a father; he is always doing generous things for me. He is delighted to see Isabel go with me to a church or a gallery, when he is too tired or too ill to accompany us, and that is often.

And day by day Isabel was happier. She became a creature of glories, shining transparencies. We had books together, music together, our work together. We had the companionship of the morning and the evening meal, sacred rituals between beings who love each other. We had infinite talks together with Uncle Tom or alone, as it happened. If Uncle Tom saw our exaltation, nevertheless he knew all that was between us. For it was beauty of life that Isabel and I shared, and who cannot know between whom this secret exists, if he have eyes to see?

He knew I loved Isabel, if he had not forgotten all that moves in the blood of a man of forty-two. He knew that she loved me—at any rate in some quality of love. For Isabel used this word freely in the ecstasies of her spirit, in the rapturous atmosphere of Italy. "I love James, Uncle Tom—not as I love you; but I really love him! How wonderful that he should come to us. He is like my brother, but he is something more. He is a great friend." Uncle Tom would smile benignantly upon this radiant woman, whom he had married for her youthful vitality, for which he gave the happiness that comes of wealth. Perhaps in his ageing psychology he did not know that there was passion in our hearts. Yet I think he was a great soul, wishing Isabel to have every happiness. I know he was my friend. There was nothing in him of the envy of January because of my younger years, nor reproof for the Maytime sunshine that was in the heart of Isabel.

Isabel and I had been to the Vatican several times. Uncle Tom disliked pictures; above all he dreaded the fatigue of walking and the cold of the churches and rooms where he was obliged to remove his hat. One afternoon Isabel proposed that we go again to the Vatican; there was a face there she wished to show me. We asked Uncle Tom to come with us; but this was one of the days when he did not feel strong enough for anything. He was keeping to his room. Perhaps later he would go to Canape's. "You two go along. You will get on without me."

Isabel took me directly to the suite which was decorated by Pinturicchio for Alexander VI. We looked at the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Magi, and the Resurrection. Somehow I was more moved by these paintings than by anything I had yet seen in Rome. The soul of this painter took possession of me. Then recalling what Isabel had said I asked her: "Where is the face, Isabel, you wished to show me?" "There," she said. "Turn around." I did and saw a bronze bust on a pedestal. "That, you mean?" Isabel nodded. I walked closer to it. It was Pinturicchio.

A deeper emotion than I had ever before felt before a work of art took possession of me. Such wisdom, benignity, genius! What a soul belonged to this man! I looked about to see if we were watched by guards. As we were alone I put up my hands to caress this face, moved by some unknown impulse. Touching the silken surface of the bronze my whole imaginative power seemed to awake; my life spread out before me. I know not what it was; memories of so many things; not least of all Isabel's presence understanding what I felt. My eyes blinded; my shoulders shook a little. Isabel came to me and gently put her hand on my arm. We walked away. "Who was Pinturicchio?" I asked of Isabel. And she told me. I took a guide-book out of my pocket and began to read. "There is a story," it said, "that Pinturicchio was starved by his wife during his last illness." I closed the book. After all had not Douglas been starved in the finer part of his genius by the life to which he was wedded? How would his face look in bronze, ridged with reason and controversy; what could ever bring him out of the dust and noise of the levels where he was battling, even to the plateaus to which poor Serafino had climbed?

After that I looked at everything of Pinturicchio's I could find in Rome. We found his Coronation of the Virgin, his frescoes of St. Antonio. But Isabel, who had already been to the Villa d'Este with Uncle Tom, began now day by day to plan another excursion there. She had not gone up to Tivoli, nor seen the cataracts; we could do all of this in an afternoon if we did not stop to wander through Hadrian's Villa. This time Serafino went with us; but Uncle Tom was again indisposed, and laughingly bade us to go on and leave him to an afternoon at Canape's with his cronies.

Serafino rode on the box with the driver, and that left Isabel and me to something like a privacy, as we drove by the quarries of travertine where the slaves of old Rome went blind and died hewing out the stone that went to the building of the Coliseum and the theaters of Marcellus and Pompey. We passed the little stream whose waters were blue with sulphur, filling the air with its odor. The grasses and herbs were green; here and there an almond tree was in blossom. The dark cypresses of Hadrian's Villa stood like spires of thunder clouds against the wonderful azures of this uplifting sky. Before us were the mountains, pine-clad, vineyard-clad; and far up the gleam of a cascade shone like a bent sword in the sun.

Serafino took us through the room of the d'Este Palace telling the driver to meet us at one of the entrances to the grounds. When we emerged and descended to the Hundred Fountains he turned away giving us the directions to reach the carriage. He knew that this was a place where lovers would wish to dispense with a guide.

We walked through the avenues of great cypress trees and came to the farther end of the pools whose curbs were decorated with flowering urns. There we looked at the palace and listened to the song of the merles. Beside this all was silence, only the stir of the wind against the soft strings of the trees—the most melodious harp in the world! We climbed to an eminence, stood by an iron fence and gazed down upon the fisheries surrounded by graceful bushes and trees. Then we found the Fontana dell' Ovato, and a seat before it. It was a semicircle of stone perforated by arches over which the water musically poured. Here we rested, listening to the merles, the falling water, the whispering of the wind. Ghosts of dead delight seemed to pass us; unseen presences of passionate gallants and capricious loveliness, hungering hearts wounded by life, by beauty, by desire, spoke to us through the murmuring water, the stir of the wind, the intense silence when all sounds were turned away by the veering of the delicious air.

And Uncle Tom was in Rome at Canape's drinking with his American cronies! Only myself knew my starved heart, but surely he knew the heart of Isabel. What was the attitude of mind in allowing this free association between Isabel and me? Does the heart of age become deadened? Does it understand; does it but partly divine these secrets; does it for any of these reasons cease to be sensitive?

Then suddenly, as Isabel and I sat there in these enchanting surroundings, an uncontrollable emotion seized me, one that had no regard for a future, that sought only to realize wholly and at once an ecstatic present. For what could be between us? I could not marry Isabel; and what could be? Blindly, without a thought of any of these things, I took Isabel's hands and drew her to me frightened and trembling. Instantly I saw what I had done. Our life of frank companionship fell away from us. A new birth was ours; but of what wonder and terror and danger! Isabel exclaimed: "Oh, my friend!" Then she lost her voice and whispered, "My friend!" She became relaxed, leaned back her head, closed her eyes. Tears crept down her cheeks. And I was silent, in a kind of madness of fear, passion, regret, nameless sorrow. What could I say, to what could she listen? There was a long silence. Then Isabel began to speak.

"Help me, my friend," she said. "How can I tell you how to be my friend? Still it must be. I care for you so deeply. Let me speak, but understand me as I try to speak, and help me. You are young and strong. You are so companionable; I never grow tired of you—but you must know that I am not different from you in all impulses, imaginings. But be my friend. Take into your being the beauty we have together; these flowers of friendship attend and keep for our garden—our Villa d'Este. Let it be open to the sky and wind as this is, a place where innocence and kindness may come, where children may play and the old rest. Ah, my friend, you have lived and now be strong for me. Uncle Tom is so fond of you. Think of all you have. You have had a wife, and you have a son. Be noble, be understanding, for really you see I am poor and you are rich. If possible these hands of passion which you have placed on mine must change, and my hands must forget what you have done. Otherwise what is the future to be?"

Isabel began to sob, between her words crying: "Oh, be my friend!" How could I comfort her? The very comfort that her heart craved was that which her sorrow strove to deny me the giving. I drew out my watch; we had long overstayed our time, for we were to lunch at the Sibylla in Tivoli. We walked slowly to the entrance where Serafino waited for us with the carriage. He was smoking a pipe, calm and happy, and in companionable conversation with the driver.

At a table near the Temple of Vesta here on the Castro Vetere, the waterfalls below us, Horace's Villa above us, we dined and became happy again.

When we got back to the pension Uncle Tom was there to greet us and to receive Isabel's kiss upon a mischievously yielded cheek, and to hear her rapturous account of the afternoon.

And I went forth with little Reverdy in the Borghese Gardens; afterwards to continue my studies of the etchings of Piranesi.

Isabel now took Reverdy into her heart with an ardor that could not be mistaken. She often went to bring him from school to the pension. She took him in walks about the broken columns of the Forum. They clambered together over the galleries of the Coliseum and to the heights of the Palatine, exploring the ruins of the palaces of the Cesar's. They had walked out to the Appian Way, and gone to listen to the merles and the golden wrens among the cypresses of the Protestant cemetery.

Reverdy had begun to call Isabel "Mamma Isabel" and Isabel addressed him as "son." Uncle Tom fell into the same way. The kinship between us was strengthened by these endearments.

But I observed something of deeper, more mystical import; Reverdy was attached to Isabel with an intense and curious filial passion. He would rush into the room and kiss Isabel, flinging his arms about her with ecstatic joy. She evoked this demonstration in some secret, maternal way. And now as I tried to remember I could not recall that Dorothy had ever caressed Reverdy—not that she was cold toward him. She was the soul of kindness. But whenever had she held him to her breast with demonstrative heart-hunger and expression; whenever had she played with him, walked with him, entered into his life of game or studies? She had never done so. Perhaps Reverdy had never had a mother after all. Now he had one in Isabel, who seemed to direct something of the energy that she had channeled into art and into travel to this boy of mine. But she did not in any way withdraw her interest from me.

I was wondering after our day at the Villa d'Este if she would place herself again in a like intimacy with me, if we should go about together as before. No, there was no change as to program; but her eyes were so clear, so innocently bright, her smile and laugh so gentle, yet free of direct invitation, above all her devotion to Uncle Tom was so noble, that I felt loath to make my approach more intimate. What I craved and what I was glad to keep was our daily association. And now while she always invited Uncle Tom to be with us and he more and more went his own way, Isabel turned to Reverdy and arranged for him to accompany us about Rome and into the country, once to Hadrian's Villa, once to Ostia where we looked upon the sea. It did not seem to me that Isabel sought to keep me at a distance and to bring in Reverdy as an influence to that end. She took such great delight in having him with us. It seemed only to happen that he went with us. It was not always so. And it was all quite natural.

We had thus become friends in the profoundest sense. Once she referred to Pinturicchio saying: "If you feel that you could have loved that man, don't you see that the same feeling can exist between a man and a woman? I am talking of that unity of two minds out of which the finest emotions come; and in the case of artists the noblest works. Love is not just passional love, just this flame that burns so brightly and then dies. It may be a flame that has no material sustenance, or so slight that we are not subtle enough to discern it; a flame that feeds on flame, unites with another flame and grows brighter for the union; and finds in the flame a substitute for oil. Friendship is what I mean—or love may be a better word. Here in Rome among the old shrines and temples where the anemones and violets bloom so profusely, before the sculptured faces of Zeus and Aphrodite and Apollo and Bacchus, one dreams one's self into intuitions of the old gods, and the lovely faiths of the ancient world. And I go sometimes alone with a book to the Borghese or to the Capitoline and there let my imagination wander in re-creation of the visions of life and the soul that came as interpretations to the ancients. I have lately been reading a book on the cult of Orpheus, the Pagan Christ, one of the loveliest figures of the Greeks. It made me believe somehow that Christ never lived, that he is only a creation of the anonymous imagination of a hungering world. For surely Orpheus did not live, and how closely he resembles Christ as an embodiment of the heart's aspiration to free itself from the material and to rise into a realm of pure beauty, understanding, devotion—all lovely things. My friend, I was thinking of you all the while. And if you could have been a friend of Pinturicchio in the noblest sense, why not of me? I am not trying to play with words or with ideas, or to perplex you, or to excite your doubts or your desires. I think you have never had a friend. What, after all, could you find in a soul so masculine, so lacking in intuition as Douglas; upon whom you have poured your admiration for all these years? Has it not been for lack of some one better to whom you could give your heart? That is why I wish that you and I could find an enduring and inspiring union in a mutual interest in great things. Forgive me, I grieve that all this seems a cruel waste to me—all these years of your life."

"Is your life not a waste?" I asked before I could check the words.

"No," Isabel replied calmly, in no way offended. "After all there is a feeling in my heart for Uncle Tom such as you might have felt for Pinturicchio. What does one derive from love? There are riches in admiration, gratitude, sympathy, filial tenderness, in desire for devotion; yes, even in pity; in the bestowal of comforting hands; in solace given in hours of fatigue and illness; in care for declining vitality. All these expressions I have. And now, my friend, I would be a help to you. I would give you eyes to understand your past; and a vision to choose a better future. If you have ever been Dionysius, which you have not, you are yet an unawakened soul. I would have you become Orpheus, attended by the Muses of all this loveliness with which we are surrounded here. By contrast it makes me think of America, so vast but so without a soul. By soul I do not mean that energy which enforces righteousness, the dream of the fanatic, the ideal of the law fabricator; but the soul of high freedoms, delights, nobilities. For there is just as much difference between those things as there is between Douglas and Pinturicchio. All of this goes without saying, of course; but I am thinking of the application of these things to you. I am your friend, you know."

Was there reality in Isabel's words? Was she not sublimating the materials of our thwarted relationship? Turning to Douglas I tried to tell her what character of thinker he was and how, in spite of any deficiency that he had, he was a brave heart and a thinking mind and a needed builder in America.

"It may be," said Isabel. We were sitting in the Gardens of Adonis once occupied in part by the golden house of Nero, here where St. Sebastian was bound to a tree and pierced with arrows. What material symbols for our thoughts! Ruins of walls, columns and capitols lay about us; and on the air was borne the music of bells and the low murmur of Rome. In this pause of our conversation I heard a cry and looking up saw Reverdy running toward us, throwing up his arms in delight and falling upon the breast of Isabel. She embraced him with all tenderness; then arose and began to run with him about the garden. In a little while we saw Uncle Tom approaching slowly. He was much out of breath and looked definitely ill. How had they found us? Isabel had told Uncle Tom that we might stroll here; and Reverdy had prevailed upon Uncle Tom to drive this way.

In a few days there was to be a service at St. Peter's which Isabel was eager to see. She was talking to Uncle Tom about it, begging him to go, and he was half consenting though reluctant. Reverdy was all delight over the prospect, and it was an opportunity for me to be with Isabel. She had never become a communicant of any church. But she abhorred atheism. It denied the love that she saw in nature, the divinity that permeated the human mind; the law she sensed in growth and decay; the spirit of beauty that reigned everywhere to her imagination. We were at one on this matter of denying a God, but the repugnance that I had had to imperial Catholicism had been increased by Serafino's recitals of Italy's sufferings under the Church and Austria. And in Rome one saw the settled dominance of clericalism. Perhaps the Church was like negro slavery. If the Church ministered to beauty and spirituality, was it not asserted in favor of slavery that it afforded leisure; did it not correspond to the fertilization which enriches the roots of a gorgeous flower? I could see Isabel turning to the esthetics in the Catholic service. "What can you say," she asked, "against a faith that surrounds itself with pictures, sculpture, music, incense, the rhythm of rich Latin, the appeal in words to life renewal, eternal life, purity, glory, tenderness? Say what you will of it; condemn its external sovereignty, of guns and poison and machinations—condemn these as you will—its ritual calls to purer dreams. And perhaps in all our life there must be oppression and particular injustice in order to produce the finest blossom."

Uncle Tom seemed to be falling into more frequent indisposition. He often lay in bed for the greater part of the morning. There were days when he did not leave his room. Again he would go forth to Canape's; and while he was rarely in anything like a stagger, he was often saturated with wine, heavy and sleepy from its influence. Isabel through it all treated him with unfailing kindness; and some of our excursions were interrupted because of Uncle Tom's taking to bed after returning from Canape's; or because he could not arise before noon after an evening with his friends. She would not desert his side. Was there something in my presence with his life with Isabel, our friendship for each other, that woke nerves to suffering which only drink could dull?

The day of the service in St. Peter's we all set forth in one carriage, Reverdy riding on the box, and Isabel, Uncle Tom, and I in the seat. I noticed that Uncle Tom was more than usually self-absorbed. Isabel patted his hand or held it, and talked to him of the objects of interest along the way.

The service was about to begin when we entered. We walked as far as the bronze plate which marks the comparative length of the Cathedral of Milan, and I was looking toward the bronze pavilion with its twisted columns which tents the tomb of St. Peter, through and around these columns at the candles on the altar. Chanting voices echoed, soared in hollow reverberations up and about the arches, the domes; an organ was giving forth soft thunder in some hidden quarter.

Suddenly Uncle Tom steps back, sways, coughs. Isabel utters a slight cry; I look at Uncle Tom and take him by the arm. Bystanders help me support him. He has turned very pale, blue at the lips. With the assistance of two men we take him to a carriage, drive to the pension. We put him to bed and send for a physician.

Reverdy is sent away, and Isabel and I watch. For Uncle Tom is dying. The doctor says it is only a matter of a few hours. Uncle Tom wishes to make a will. Will I write it out for him? His thoughts are clear. He remembers his possessions, his relations. To brothers and sisters he gives handsome purses, all the rest to Isabel.

"Isabel," he says with difficulty. "Yes, my dear," she replies in a voice of great tenderness. "Isabel, I want to give Jimmy something—ten thousand dollars." Before she can speak I interject: "I do not need it, Uncle Tom." He rolled his head in a negative, turned his hand feebly. "I give it to you that you may do something for her. Then it will be from you and from me too." Isabel stifles a sob by placing her hands tightly over her mouth. "Write," says Uncle Tom; and I write.

The will is written. The doctor has come again. Uncle Tom signs the will in our presence. Then he asks the doctor for medicine for his lungs. "I seem to have a cough," he says. But it is not his lungs but his heart. We are standing by the bed. Uncle Tom takes our hands and puts them together. Instantly his head sinks upon the pillow. He is dead. The doctor walks from the room. Isabel and I stand by the bed with closed eyes, holding hands.

Standing beside the dead body of this man a future with Isabel took form in my heart. Love is a great solemnity itself. And in this moment I felt that Isabel shared my vision.

We buried Uncle Tom. Then Isabel began to prepare to sail for America. Of course no trip now around the world. She must go back to Connecticut, but she must go alone. That was her wish. It was understood that I should follow her later. This much was definite between us. Many plans filled her mind. She had a large estate to put in order. There were lawyers and agents to consult. I really wished to return with her in order to assist her. But she said: "It is best for you to stay here for a while. We shall write to each other. Later I wish you to come."

The question in my mind was not shall we be married, but when shall we be married. But Isabel's mood was too serious, too majestic for me to broach these definite subjects now. I looked into her eyes. It seemed to me that my thoughts were silently communicated to her. She pressed my hand gently. And so after some days of packing, in which I helped her constantly, she sailed away and left me in Rome.

I tried to work but the time would not pass. All my drawings and etchings were failures. What after all was art to me except a diversion? Too late! The only art that I ever could achieve was that of giving happiness to Isabel and being worthy of her devotion. Her letters came frequently, always so full of wise observations, striking fancies and imagery; so many with thanks for what I had been to her. She wrote me that Uncle Tom's will, as he had dictated it, had been probated and acquiesced in by every one.

Six months went by. I had gone with Reverdy to Lake Maggiore to escape the heat in Rome. While I was there a letter came from Isabel asking me to come to her. In three weeks I was by her side, having first placed Reverdy in Phillips Exeter. We were together in the great homestead which had belonged to Uncle Tom's father, there in Connecticut. It was full of the treasures of old times. Priceless things gathered on Isabel's travels—a great house set in a wonderful expanse of grounds about a mile from a pretty village. It was October. The earth was aflame with the fires of the forest. Jays cried from the maples. The air was subtle with a delicate scent of pine needles and fallen leaves.

She had other guests in the house. But they dispersed themselves gracefully. We were much alone, reading, listening to music played softly by one of her woman friends at a distance in the drawing room. Our favorite place was the window seat in the library, heaped with pillows and overlooking lilac and rose bushes, where we could see the great elms, the fountain, the country beyond. We had many walks together; and one afternoon we came to a place on a woodland path amid hills, trees towering above us, a brook playing below us. The air was hushed with a passionate Orpheus, and there I sensed her yearning. I heard the rhythm of her flesh singing to me. Her hands were stretched toward me, the pupils of her eyes grew wide as if a vision stood before her. For the first time I kissed Isabel upon the lips.

Hitherto we had breathed the rarefied air of the peaks, seen the white light of the upper spaces, felt the passionless gods about us. Now we were descending the rich valleys, to the clustered vines, to the places of soft sounds and voluptuous air, to havens of sleep, to the replenishment of our souls in the bridal supper.

That night we sat again in the window seat. Her other guests faded here and there. For a time there were shadowy fancies from the piano, then the house was stilled. But outside an April rain was falling. It pelted the windowpanes as softly as driven petals. It made a fairy swish as of far-off waves, and we sat together in a dim light. Isabel's eyes were closed. Her head rested partly on my shoulder, partly on a pillow. Her hand lay limp in my hand. Her whole being was relaxed. We were quite alone.

Isabel was with me body and mind. But a terror crept upon me. My very hair trembled. I pressed her hand to my breast. It seemed only an act of will, however, not of emotion. I drew her head close to my breast. All these actions arrayed themselves before my detached observation. Paralyzing self-analysis preoccupied me. I kissed her upon the brow, the eyes, with pressure and strength upon the lips. I was not acting; I was thinking out these demonstrations. The consciousness that I was deceiving Isabel broke my emotional concentration. Could she sense that my heart was beating, but with terror? Where were the flames that had sung to me ethereally before? Where the song out of the flesh, but too subtle for the ears of flesh? Yet I drew her closer to me, folded her tightly against my breast. My imaginative strength was more and more absorbed in self-analysis, into wonder as to what weakness had taken place in me. For here was Isabel dissolved in my arms and how could I continue this futile demonstration? But why also desist? The sweat began to stand out on my forehead. What should I say? Uncle Tom no longer stood between us. Isabel was my bride. There were no barriers to break down, no protests to overcome. We were both of an age and of an experience where formalities lose their significance. The goddess had descended to me and here was I a witless fool. Finally there flashed into my mind what she had said to me in Rome: "My friend, for this once be Orpheus—Orpheus was once Dionysius. Orpheus, tranquil and inspired, touched the quiet lyre surrounded by the Muses. Orpheus had been Dionysius drinking wine, beating cymbals. Be Orpheus, my friend, and take into your being these beauties of the mind which are given us—these flowers of friendship attend and keep for our garden."

These words ran through my tortured brain. They completed my enervation. But I could utter none of them to Isabel. What fear that hatred was budding in the heart of this woman at my side! I pressed her hands every now and then to see what was moving in her; for as my mind would not cease to analyze, analysis became keener. Always she returned the pressure. Her kisses at first given with ardent emotion were now lisped softly against my cheek. So we sat side by side. The rain pelted the window, the clock chimed. And the night was passing. A proposal of marriage seemed belated, incongruous. Yet it came into my mind as a protective coloration to more immediate expressions of the moment.

Men have lost women because they dishonored them or betrayed them or changed for the time toward them—for a thousand reasons. But look at me. What were friendship, truth, honor, the service of all that I was, love in its highest and deepest sense, understanding, sympathy with all of Isabel's flights of the mind, if I could not come to her with a promise of the future? She was not only the revelation of all that I had desired and of all that I had missed in life, but she was the symbol of a fate that has come past the appointed hour. I was the father of Reverdy by Dorothy, whom I loved with a heart's beginning; and I was the defeated lover of the ideal whom I had found too late.

In these circumstances of myself and Isabel were symbolized the lives of all men who give their devotions to lesser loves, who find their creations and their work imperfect or worthless when the planting season has passed.

As hollow as the words sounded, I nevertheless asked Isabel to be my wife. And Isabel without changing her position and without opening her eyes said in the quietest of voices: "You know I love you. You know I have loved you in every way a woman can. I love you as I loved Uncle Tom; for you are my friend, as he was. But what will the future be? I have been compelled all my life to center my thought upon books and music, friends, travel, and devotion to Uncle Tom. I have developed this power of concentration and self-denial; but would you bring me to live over again what I lived with Uncle Tom? Oh, my friend, no man can understand and fathom the maternal desire in a woman. It is a mystery which she alone knows."

What life remained in me sank down just as a stricken eagle falls into the thickets and is still; and breathes quietly and draws the film over its eyes. I could not answer her. The October air was mild. The house was overheated. A window was open. An entering wind began to stir my hair. I thought of how it must look to another, these beginnings of gray hair. Age had come to me. And I could see Isabel with my feelings alone, sitting beside me so pale, so tender, so sorrowful.

The clock strikes three. Isabel arouses, turns slightly from me, and gradually sits up. "That was three, wasn't it?" she asked. "Your train leaves early in the morning. You must sleep a few hours. I shall not see you at breakfast. The maid will bring it to you. Shall we have a glass of wine together?"

She poured wine for me and we drank. She handed me a lighted candle. Then she stood and searched my face. She offered her lips to me, turned and walked away.

I stood with the candle in my hand, watching her until she passed through the shadows and darkness of the hall. The house was without a sound. No step of her came from the hall or the stair. I still stood with the candle in that silence and fluttering darkness. Then I went to my room.

But I did not retire. I stood for a few moments looking through the window into the darkness. Then I placed my belongings in my satchel, stole softly out of the room, down the great stairs, opened the great door of the main hallway and walked off the porch on to the gravel road, through the iron gate and into the highway leading to the village. I looked back at Isabel's mansion, at the roof dark between the dark trees. Under that roof the most priceless heart I had found in life was beating—but was it in sleep or in wakefulness? I was numbed, stunned, hopeless. I could never return here, never see Isabel again. The Orphic metamorphosis meant a complete disappearance from her life. She had not turned me away or dismissed me; she had done no cruel thing, said no word that wounded or would grow poignant in memory. She had been in every way an angel of light—and for these reasons I could not see her again. Whatever I was in truth, rid of accidental emotions if such they were, I had filled her mind with fear and doubt. Thus our fate was made, our sorrow was born.

As I walked along in the darkness toward the village, my loneliness in the world came over me. I had not attached many to me; many of those I had won were gone. Was there a home for me? How could I return to the house in Chicago? To what there? I had come from Italy to America; from a city of memories and spiritual richnesses to the tumult of New York. Above all I had found heaven in Isabel and lost it. My life had come to flower only to be withered. I had stepped out of heaven into hell, and from a great light into darkness.

But the soul does not give up while there is breath. If one is ill he looks forward to health; if he is slowly dying he hopes for years of life; if one friend is lost there is another to turn to. No heart so desperate but can imagine a haven, however poor it may be, and go to it.

In this hour my mind turned to Reverdy back in Jacksonville. There could be no truer, kinder heart. There in the prairie of Illinois that I had grown up with he would be my solace. What had I to do with Rome, with art; what with a woman like Isabel? I had ventured on sacred ground and this was my punishment. A god had driven me forth. I had won my heart's desire; but before I could enjoy it a god, ironical but just, intuitive and swift to punish, had sent me down to my place in life. I would go to Reverdy, and stand before him in my familiar guise. He would not see Rome in my eyes; he would not know that I had been in Paradise; that in my heart shone a face that I had put by and should never look on again. Every man is a temple of forsaken shrines, of altars where candles burned replenished by spirits that need open no doors—a temple whose portals are barred.

I went through Chicago, which had grown and changed in my absence so marvelously, straight to Jacksonville, regarding nothing on my way, reading nothing. Like a supernatural being which has girdled the earth in a second, it seemed that I stood before Reverdy and Sarah and their children. I stood before them, but I could hear the bells of Rome; and I saw Isabel as she handed the candle to me and walked from the room.

I supplemented what I had written to them of Dorothy's death; then I told them brokenly of Rome. Where could I begin, what words could I select to express briefly my experiences? But besides, Isabel was all my thought, and of her I could not speak. Then we had the meal. The house, the town, the surrounding country, began to assemble themselves together familiarly. I was back. The old life was slipping on me as one removes his best dress for the overalls of work. Pinturicchio! What light was falling on those soft and tender cheeks in the Vatican? But where was Douglas?

Douglas! Reverdy looked at me as if he had much to say. "He's campaigning," said Reverdy; "already has made about a hundred speeches. He has a fight on his hands. He has a tough rival to handle."

"Who is it?"

"Abraham Lincoln!"

"Who is Abraham Lincoln?"

I had never heard that name before; nor seen it in print. Reverdy went on to tell me briefly that Lincoln had been in the legislature at the same time that Douglas was in 1836; that he had been in Congress in 1847; that he was well known as a lawyer in Springfield; that for many years he had done nothing but practice law, though more active in politics since 1855 than before. That was some explanation of my ignorance of the name.

I repeated it aloud: "Abraham Lincoln. That is a great name," I said to Reverdy. "Well, he's an able lawyer, and he gives Douglas enough to do in the debates they're having." "So they are debating, are they?" I asked. "Yes," drawled Reverdy, "Lincoln was nominated for Senator by the Republicans; Douglas of course is again the nominee of the Democrats. Lincoln challenged Douglas to a debate; and they're at it hot and heavy. We talk of nothing else. It's funny you didn't hear of it anywhere along the way home. This part of the country is on fire, and they say the East is waking up to what is going on here in Illinois. I've got the newspapers here containing all the debates. You've got some good reading ahead of you. To-morrow's the last debate over at Alton."

"We must go," I said quickly. "I wouldn't miss that for the world. We must go." And I was thinking, what better way to forget Isabel? Reverdy was really glad to hear this debate at Alton; but it was necessary for him to attend to some things this day in preparation of being absent to-morrow. In the afternoon he had to drive out to his farm, and I went with him. And when we came within a short distance of the log cabin, where I had spent my first winter on the farm, I was seized with a desire to see it again. There was so much of Rome and Italy fresh in my mind with which to contrast my previous life. And we drove to the cabin.

The door had fallen to one side. The clay between the logs had dried, turned to dust, and fallen away. The roof had sagged. The fireplace was going to wreck. We looked in. Weeds had grown up during the summer through the crevices of the floor. The place was lonely and haunted. "Well," said Reverdy, "this is the kind of a home that Lincoln had as a boy. He was born in a cabin like this; and he's poor now. He has never got rich like Douglas has. And Douglas will soon be as poor as Lincoln if he keeps on at the same rate spending money in this campaign. They say he has mortgaged nearly all his property in Chicago. Everybody's fighting him—the Republicans, all the Abolitionists, and half the Democrats. This campaign means his political death or life."

"You say Lincoln was born in a log cabin. Is this a campaign of the log cabin, hard cider, and war records?"

"Well, perhaps more log cabins, but no war record. Lincoln was never in any war but the Black Hawk. He was against the Mexican War; and when in Congress voted for resolutions that the war was unconstitutional and improper. No, he is not old Harrison or old Zach Taylor. Still the log cabin is in the fight."

Then Reverdy went on to tell me that Lincoln was a clean man and that the Republicans had no abler man in Illinois; that he had been a good deal in politics after all, though quiet for about ten years. That while Douglas had been Senator, chairman of the committee on territories, his name on everybody's tongue, the most prominent man and the most active in the whole country, building railroads, organizing territories, battling with Great Britain, settling California and Oregon, and Kansas and Nebraska, traveling abroad into Russia and Asiatic Europe, and companioning with notables everywhere, making money almost like a millionaire, Lincoln had been over at Springfield practicing law, talking on the street corners, sitting in his office alone in reflection, sometimes reading; but all the while, in a way, resting.

"He's fresh and Douglas is tired," said Reverdy. "He has the advantage of not having committed himself much. Douglas has spoken freely on everything. He's four years older than Douglas, but he's a younger man. He's a temperance man they say; and while I like a drink, I don't like to see a man drink as much as Douglas does. They say he's been pouring it down during this campaign. But as for Douglas' stooping to debate with Lincoln, it's no stoop. They make the fur fly when they talk. What I fear is that there's going to be trouble in this country. I hate slavery, but I hate this agitation too. I don't want to see the North keep on making war on the South. It will breed trouble sure. And this is where I stand with Douglas. He is for non-interference with slavery and his election will be a quieter."

When we got back to Reverdy's house I plunged into the newspapers containing the debates. I read until suppertime, and then late into the night. I read them all. I went to bed and analyzed the arguments.

A house divided against itself cannot stand! This was Seward's irrepressible conflict clothed in Biblical language. The religious revival which had swept the country gave these words a compelling acceptance. But as I read this it came over me that both Jesus and Lincoln were sophists. For a house divided against itself can stand; and irrepressible conflicts rage forever. They may change their ground, but they do not cease. I had seen this in Europe and in Italy, where in the January just past a certain Orsini had attempted the life of Louis Napoleon because he had not acceded to the labors of Cavour and thus hastened the liberty of Italy. And yet Italy was standing and France. Houses are divided everywhere and they stand. Beelzebub is crafty enough to cast out devils here and there in order to confound his kingdom with the Kingdom of Heaven. Of course he does not cast all the devils out—if he did he would lose his kingdom—only enough to make himself appear as one of the divine wonder-workers. A house divided against itself can stand, even as the world can stand with both good and evil in it, with both God and Satan in divided authority over it; and even as man has good and evil in his own nature and still lives and works without becoming wholly good or wholly evil. So could this country stand divided into free and slave states as it was formed at the beginning. There was not the slightest chance that it would ever become all slave, as Lincoln had presented one of the alternatives of a divided house. There was great chance that it would become all free by natural processes, as Douglas had indicated over and over again before the time of these debates.

Here I found that the debaters had split hairs on what the fathers had done. "Why can't these agitators leave the states as they were made by the fathers, slave and free?" asked Douglas. "They were not made," retorted Lincoln, "they were found; slavery was found and was let be as it was." "No," said Douglas, "the fathers organized a republic, adopted a Constitution; and when they made it, instead of abolishing slavery, making it free, they kept slavery and made it slave by the votes of states passing upon and acceding to an instrument of government. And besides, this instrument of government provided for the importation of more slaves from Africa; and provided for the capture and return of fugitive slaves now in the country or thereafter to be imported into the country."

Douglas had attacked the doctrine of a divided house with all possible power and brilliancy. He had insisted that there was no more reason for the house of America to be divided because there was negro slavery in some states and no slavery in others, than because there was prohibition in Maine and whisky in Kentucky. And that there would be disunion if some states warred on other states about the purely domestic affairs of the latter. This was the only sense in which the house could be divided, and caused to fall. That disparate interests in the states should not make hostility between them; and that hostility arising from attacks and agitation should be put down. He went on to denounce the Republican party for holding and preaching a faith that arrayed one section of the country against another; and with great satire and invective he showed that the Republicans stood upon sectional principles which could not be preached in the South and not everywhere in the North. "But now you have a sectional organization," he had said to a theocratic audience at Galesburg, "a party which appeals to the northern section of the Union against the southern, a party which appeals to northern passion, northern pride, northern ambition, and northern prejudices, against southern people, the southern states, and southern institutions. The leaders of that party hope to be able to unite the northern states in one great sectional party; and inasmuch as the North is the strongest section they will thus be enabled to outvote, conquer, and control the South. Is there a Republican in Galesburg who can travel into Kentucky and carry his principles with him across the Ohio?"

Douglas had even shown that Lincoln did not utter the same sentiments in all parts of Illinois. In Chicago where there was a large alien vote Lincoln had said: "I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it, where will it stop? If one man says it does not mean a negro, why may not another man say it does not mean another man? If the Declaration is not the truth let us get the statute books in which we find it and tear it out. Who is so bold as to do it?... Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position, discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things and unite as one people throughout this land until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

Douglas had driven Lincoln hard upon this application of the Declaration of Independence with the result that in the southern part of Illinois, at Charleston, Lincoln had uttered these words of a very different tenor:

"I will say then that I am not nor never have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not nor never have been in favor of making free voters of the negroes or jurors or qualifying them to hold office or having them marry with white people. I will say in addition that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I suppose will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality; and inasmuch as they cannot so live that while they do remain together there must be the position of the superior and the inferior; that I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white man."

Lincoln and Douglas were therefore at one on this. But how about slavery? Lincoln looked forward to a time when slavery would be abolished. How could that be? By not admitting any more slave states? No! For Lincoln confessed that he would as a Senator vote to admit a slave state, if it as a territory had had a free chance to have slavery or freedom as it chose, and if in becoming a state it freely adopted a slave constitution. As to these opinions Lincoln and Douglas were agreed; for Douglas had fought the Kansas constitution because it forced slavery on Kansas; and now the whole Buchanan administration in Illinois was arrayed against Douglas for his attitude on Kansas, and Lincoln was profiting by that.

How would Lincoln abolish slavery? By starving it, girding it about gradually with freedom, keeping it where it was. That was all. What would Douglas do? Referring to Lincoln's looking forward to a time when slavery would be abolished everywhere Douglas said: "I look forward to a time when each state shall be allowed to do as it pleases. If it chooses to keep slavery forever, it is not my business but its own; if it chooses to abolish slavery, it is its own business not mine. I care more for the great principles of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom. I would not endanger the perpetuity of this Constitution, I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the negroes that ever existed."

What would Lincoln do about the fugitive-slave law? Douglas had denounced attempts to evade it and actual violations of it. Even the Whigs frowned on its nullification. What would Lincoln do? He was not in favor of its repeal. He had said at Freeport: "I think under the Constitution of the United States, the people of the Southern States are entitled to a Congressional fugitive-slave law.... As we are now in no agitation in regard to an alteration or modification of that law, I would not be the man to introduce it as a new subject of agitation upon the general question of slavery."

For the rest, what did it all come to? Like two pugilists Lincoln and Douglas blocked each other's blows, drove each other into corners. Lincoln twitted Douglas about being on both sides of the matter of extending the Missouri Compromise. Then Douglas tripped Lincoln, who had asserted that only slavery had ever disturbed the peace of the Union. "How about the War of 1812, and the Hartford convention?" asked Douglas. How about the tariff and South Carolina in 1832? He might have asked, how about the Alien and Sedition laws and the Kentucky resolutions of 1798. But for the rest, what did it all come to?

Lincoln contended that Congress had the power to forbid slavery in the territories; Douglas worked up from a position, which scarcely denied the power, but rather shrank from its use, to the position that sovereignty abode in the people of the territory; and that as Congress has no express grant of power to legislate upon slavery as to a territory, the territorial sovereignty had the only power to do so. He attacked Lincoln's position that a territory is a creature of Congress as a property, to be clothed with powers or denied powers; and particularly with powers not possessed by Congress itself. This doctrine led to imperialism. Douglas held that Congress had the power to organize territories under the clause providing for the admission of new states; but when they were organized they assumed an organic sovereignty out of an inchoate sovereignty, and had the right to legislate as they chose to the same extent as a state. It was the old fight between implied powers and strict construction.

What in the Constitution forbade slaves from being taken into the territories? Not a thing. Moreover the territories were the commons of all the states, won by their common valor and blood. Could not a liquor dealer from Chicago take his stock to Kansas? Assuredly. Why then could not a planter from Louisiana take his slaves to Nebraska? Liquor and slaves were property. Who said so? The fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution, and the fugitive-slave law of 1850 which Lincoln admitted he would not alter.

But after the liquor was in Kansas or the slave in Nebraska could they flourish? That depended on the territorial law, the attitude of the people. Did Congress have to pass favorable legislation? From what clause flowed the duty and the power? Did a territorial legislature have power to pass favorable legislation? It was not called upon to do so by anything in the Federal Constitution. Therefore, the mere right to take a slave into free territory under the Dred Scott decision, take it as property, was a naked right without local support. "This popular sovereignty is as thin as soup made from the shadow of a starved pigeon," said Lincoln. Nevertheless, it was what it was and no more. And Lincoln's catch question on the legal right to keep slavery out of the territories did not catch Douglas. The mere right to take a slave into free territory could coexist with no protective legislation after the slave was there. It could coexist with unfavorable legislation and social opposition. Let natural processes rule.

What was the difference between this and girding the slave states around with freedom? That could scarcely be done without the aid of natural processes.

But since Douglas did not admit that Congress had to give favorable legislation to a slave owner who had taken his slave into a territory, the South was drawing away from him. He was not their friend to the extreme doctrine of taking a slave into a territory and keeping him a slave against the will of the territory. Was Douglas unmoral? What of the unmorality of taking Kansas and Nebraska from the Indians? Was he syllogistic, analytic, intellectually hard? But was not Lincoln so too? Douglas derived from Jefferson through Jackson; Lincoln from Hamilton through Webster, whatever else could be said of them.

Thus I read on through the night until I had finished all that Douglas and Lincoln had said at the six debates then finished. The next morning Reverdy and I started for Alton.

I could scarcely wait to get my first glimpse of Lincoln.

Alton, this old town that I had visited so many times before, was crowded with people drawn from the surrounding country, from across the river in Missouri. As to the temper of the audience, it rather favored Douglas. I saw the leering, ugly faces that I had seen in the lobbies of the hotels in St. Louis years before at the railroad convention, when Captain Grant was lounging there and planters swarmed at the bar and cursed Yankees and nigger-lovers.

It was the fifteenth of October, fair and temperate. Thousands swarmed around the speaker's stand in the public square, which was bare of flags or mottoes by express orders of the masters of ceremony. The time arrived. Lincoln came to the platform and took a seat.

He was tall, enormously tall, long of limb, angular, narrow shouldered. His skin was yellow and dry, wrinkled. His hair was black and coarse. His eyes were sunk back in his head with a melancholy expression which could flame into humor or indignation. But his forehead was full, shapely, and noble. The largeness of his nose, tilted a little to one side, gave sculptural strength to his face. His great mouth with its fleshy underlip, supplemented the nose. Both were material for grotesque caricature. He looked like an educated gawk, a rural genius, a pied piper of motley followers. He was a sad clown, a Socratic wag, a countryman dressed up for a state occasion. But he was not a poor man defending the cause of the poor. There was nothing of the dreamer in his make-up, the eccentric idealist. His big nose and mouth and Henry Clay forehead denied all of this. He sat in self-possession, in poise, clothed in the order of confident reason, unafraid, sure of himself but without vanity, in a wise detachment, on a vantage point of vision. His frock coat, rusty from dust and wear, did not fit him. The sleeves escaped his wrists by several inches; his trousers had hitched up as he sat down, so that one half of his shanks was exposed to view, leaving his monstrous feet, like the slap-boots of a negro minstrel, for ludicrous inches over the floor. His neck was long and feminine, and stuck up grotesquely much above a sort of Byronic collar held together by a black stock tie. I had never seen a man so absurd.

Douglas was as ludicrously short as Lincoln was tall; broad shouldered where Lincoln was narrow; thick chested where Lincoln was thin; big headed where Lincoln was small; of massive brow where Lincoln was full and shapely; of strong bull-like neck where Lincoln was small and delicate; of short, compact, powerful body where Lincoln was tall, loosely constructed, awkward, and muscular. Douglas' face wore determination, seriousness, force, pugnacity, and endurance. But his hair was grayer than mine; he looked tired. He arose and in that great melodious voice which always thrilled me, he said: "It is now nearly four months since the canvass between Mr. Lincoln and myself commenced."

He went on and controverted Mr. Lincoln's "house divided against itself," going over the ground of the previous debate. There was not a sound of disturbance in the audience. They were in a charm, a trance. Oratory could rise to no greater heights. Then after saying that the Declaration of Independence did not include the negro, Indians, or Fiji Islanders, but that all dependent races should be treated nevertheless with fairness, and that it did not follow that because a negro was an inferior he must be a slave, he appealed to the rights of the states and the territories to control slavery for themselves. He closed with these memorable words:

"Why can we not thus have peace? Why should we allow a sectional party to agitate this country, to array the North against the South, and convert us into enemies instead of friends merely that a few ambitious men may ride into power on a sectional hobby? How long is it since these ambitious northern men wished for a sectional organization? Did any one of them dream of a sectional party as long as the North was the weaker section and the South the stronger? Then all were opposed to sectional parties; but the moment the North obtained the majority in the House and in the Senate by the admission of California and could elect a President without the aid of southern votes, that moment ambitious men formed a scheme to excite the North against the South and make the people be governed in their votes by geographical lines, thinking that the North being the stronger section would outvote the South and consequently they, the leaders, would ride into office on a sectional hobby. I am told that my hour is out. It was very short."

Short it was. I thought he had just begun. What would this strange creature now rising to six feet four inches of awkward angularity say in reply to this wonderful oration? He opened his great mouth and spoke. What is this? A falsetto note, a piping instead of the musical thunder we have heard. He poses strangely, his gestures shoot up and out like the arms of a dislocated clothes rack. He rises on his toes with a quick springlike movement, as if he were a puppet loosened by a spring from a box. He sways from side to side to give emphasis to his words. His mouth opens to huge proportions in moments of excitement. His black hair falls over his forehead. His great nose sticks out like a signboard. Is he scoring?

I know, for I have read the other debates. He is wasting no words; he is meeting Douglas point by point, whether successfully or not. He seemed embarrassed, diffident at first. Why not? He is fighting a giant; then there are ugly faces in the audience, men in drink, slave owners from Missouri, Democrats who hate sectionalism and loathe the rise of the Republican party. Whispers are near me: "He amounts to nothing. Douglas has laid him out. He is scared. The Little Giant has choked him."

But Lincoln goes on. His earnestness deepens, his seriousness becomes more impressive. His voice is carrying even though it pipes. He has endurance, too, and courage and fighting will. But Douglas has made it very difficult for him; indeed he has brought Lincoln to his terms on nearly everything—all but the 'house divided against itself' doctrine; and the right and duty of Congress to keep slavery out of the territories. These are issues between him and Douglas still; but is this the real issue after all? He is nearly through. He has been going on as if he were making a statement of a case. It is interjected with argument; but it is largely statement of positions. It is declaratory and follows the form of a poem, not an argument. It assumes premises; he says "I think so." It has reason back of it, but it is the reason of things proven. It is fortified by matters of general acceptance. It has logic, but the logic of things existing inherently, not made. And at last, more earnestly than before, he says:

"On the point of my wanting to make war between the free and the slave states, there has been no issue between us. So too when he says that I am in favor of introducing a perfect social and political equality between the white and the black races. These are false issues upon which Judge Douglas has tried to force the controversy. There is no foundation in truth for the charges that I maintain either of these propositions. The real issue in this controversy—the one pressing upon every mind—is the sentiment upon the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong. The sentiment that contemplates the institution of slavery in this country as a wrong is the sentiment of the Republican party. It is the sentiment around which all their actions, all their arguments, circle, from which all their propositions radiate. That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silenced. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of Time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same spirit that says: 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of man as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle."

What had come over Lincoln? He was no longer awkward. A divine grace permeated his being. The October sun threw glory upon his brow, gave us a look into his deeply illuminated eyes, left nothing of the great nose and mouth but their strength, the sculptural impressiveness of stone features in the sides of hills. What would Serafino think if he could hear this?

Then of a sudden I saw Pinturicchio in Lincoln's face, the same gentleness along the sunken cheeks, the same imaginative glow in the whole countenance. Here in this warped and homely face, this face out of the womb of poverty and sorrow, the winter loneliness of the forest, the humbleness and the want of the log cabin, the mystical yearning of humanity on the prairies and under the woodland stars, I saw for a swift moment in the glancing of the sun, as he uttered these words, the genius of the poet who knows and states, who has lived years of loneliness and failure, who has seen others grow rich, notable, and powerful, and who has remained obscure and unobeyed, with nothing but a vision which has become lightning at last in a supreme moment of inspiration. Lincoln had had his hour whatever should befall him.

The debate was over—the debates were over. Reverdy and I walked away with the great crowd hurrahing for Douglas, a few hurrahing for Lincoln.

I began to repeat to myself what Douglas had said years before in the Senate in replying to Webster: "There is a power in this nation greater either than the North or the South—a growing, increasing, and swelling power that will be able to speak the law of this nation and to execute the law as spoken. That power is the country known as the Great West. There, sir, is the hope of this nation—the resting place of the power that is not only to control but to save the Union."

This prediction had now been fulfilled. This West had produced Lincoln and Douglas. One of them was sure to have the responsibility of executing the law as spoken. Of this I was sure.

When I got back to Chicago I found a letter from Isabel. It read:

"My dear friend: It hurts me to think that you stole off in the darkness. I can see you in imagination walking the lonely way, carrying your satchel. Perhaps it made no difference that you did not stay until morning, but still it hurts me. And what can I say to you now? Are we like two people who are kept from each other by circumstances that they do not control, like friends whom a war separates? I hardly know how to express myself. There seems to be nothing to say; and yet there is so much for which I wish I had words; or I wish some word of mine could alter the circumstances. I am loath to lose your friendship, your association. We have so much in common that can be enjoyed through letters; and I do wish you to write me. Above all you must not think that anything of depreciation or disregard has entered my heart. If this be true, why must you change toward me? Do I speak fantastically when I ask you to try out a marriage of the mind? The experiences through which you and I have passed have enabled me to penetrate the reality of my wishes and so even to have had them. I have known one kind of devotion; and I can fancy disillusionment coming over something more intensely emotional. Can we not think that we might grow tired of each other, and that we are to-day where we would be if we should become disillusioned but without having the bitterness of such an experience? Our poor human natures are cursed with fatigue, and with the loss of beauty and vision consequent upon daily intimacy. Let me say to you then that I love you and shall always love you, and that I have nothing in my heart that would not console you if everything in my heart was frankly expressed to you. If I ever should marry any one you will not lose your place in my affections. I turn to my life which I left for you. And you must see that if you have tragedy, so have I. As far as possible lift yourself out of the disturbing things of politics, and leave lesser personalities with the gods who are fashioning this world in the image of more enduring truths. There is solace to me, and I hope there may be to you, in the fact that we two are in the world together and that I can think of you as my friend and I trust can write to you as I hope you will write to me. Let us face the reality and consider that after all we have the sweetest and best of things that can be between a man and a woman. If I can ever help you in any way I shall be so glad. I sense somehow that you may fear me, thinking that you have become indifferent in my eyes. This is not true. I cannot too often assure you of this. I hope for good things for you and your Reverdy. Give my love to him from 'Mamma Isabel' and believe me, affectionately, Isabel."

And I wrote to Isabel: "Some of your admonitions came too late to me, for I am interested in politics again. I have just returned from Alton where I went to hear Douglas debate against a Mr. Lincoln, a lawyer of Springfield, who has been nominated for Senator by the Republicans. He is as much of a backwoodsman as anybody could be, as much so as Harrison and a good deal more so than Taylor. But he is not to be despised either in himself or on account of his backers. The Republican party in Illinois profits by the feeling of the German révolutionnaires; and Lincoln may be ever so poor and so humble, nevertheless the Republican party has drawn to itself some of the richest and most powerful interests in the country; interests which are far-sighted enough to see that if the Republican party can be put into power the mercantile ambition of the North to control the South and the whole country will be realized. No human being could have been a greater orator than Douglas was at Alton; while Lincoln, in spite of disadvantages of voice and manner and physique, rose to great heights of eloquence. The climax of his speech was when he spoke of the world-old struggle between right and wrong. I was swept off my feet for the moment and seemed to see in his face something of the genius of Pinturicchio. Now I wonder if I was not befooled both as to the value of Lincoln's utterance and as to his kinship with the great Italian artist. After all I do not know what is right and wrong; and I do not believe any one else does. I see that people get worked up into furies over what they think is right and wrong, and kill each other on account of it. Later ages view the matter as of no importance; and the lives that are lost in the struggle are as forgotten as the multitudinous leaves which bestrew the ground of an autumnal forest. I fear I am in a very bad state of mind. It is true, as you intimate in your letter, that I am passing through a certain humiliation of spirit; and I am thus inclined to speculate on the value of all truths and philosophies. I seem to see that material things control truths and influence our human natures in every way. Our experience demonstrates this fact. And in the case of Douglas and Lincoln, Douglas is quick to sense the moralistic hypocrisy with which the Republicans are draping their trafficking ambitions. But, on the other hand, I believe that Lincoln is as honest in his desire to keep slavery out of the territories as Douglas is honest in his plan to let the territories decide the matter for themselves. Both of these men are ambitious. Lincoln is of the industrial faith which is backboning the Republican party, and Douglas is of the vaguer and less materialistic faith which for so long has appealed to American Democracy in terms and promises of all kinds of freedoms and independencies.... I would give my life almost to see you again, but somehow I do not know how to bring it about, while at the same time I am living in hope that it may be so, and trusting that you will see me in a different light, and that I can give you assurances which will justify your vision. I am not very well and have been consulting a physician, since coming West, who seems to think that my nerves are in bad condition and that I am worn by striving and by life. It is curious too that Douglas, though bulky and fat, seems to me a tired man. Perhaps both of us have lost the way; and it may be true that later he will have the true vision as I did in you. I wish you could call me back to you. My mind wavers as I write. Affectionately, James."

With the exchange of these letters I merged my feelings into other things. The roar of Illinois and of the country tended to keep my mind from brooding on Isabel. There was a melancholy resignation in the words of Lincoln upon his own defeat for the Senatorship, which were in key with my own grief and helped me to sublimate it. He had written to a friend who chanced to show me the letter: "It gave me a hearing on the great and durable questions of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone."

The cause of civil liberty! Had not Douglas stood for this too? He had won against the terrific opposition of the Buchanan administration. He had fought the slave constitution of Kansas and he had beaten down in this campaign the enmity which had risen up around him because he had fought that constitution. The Republicans were exceedingly glad that Douglas' contest had divided the support of his own party. They had no thanks for him for what he had done for civil liberty in that regard. They were glad of his election over Lincoln for the sinister reason that Douglas' triumph, since Douglas was almost at one with Lincoln as to the matter of slavery, meant a decline and a division of the Democratic party as a whole. At the same time there was talk now of Lincoln for the Presidency. But Lincoln did not think he was worthy of the honor. Lincoln was writing and saying: "What is the use of talking of me whilst we have such men as Seward and Chase, and everybody knows them, and scarcely anybody outside of Illinois knows me; besides, as a matter of justice, is it not due to them? I admit I am ambitious and would like to be President.... But there is no such good luck in store for me as the Presidency of these United States." There was a pathos about this man Lincoln which won my heart.

I spent some evenings now with Aldington and Abigail. We drove out to see the Douglas property south of the town. A horse-car line was being built from Randolph Street to 12th Street, but beyond that was the waste of sand and of scrub oaks, and the land which Douglas had all but lost in financing himself in this campaign. I was ready to help Douglas with money if he would accept it from me; but just now he was not an easy man to find, and he did not come to me.

The trial and execution of John Brown was another thunderclap. And Abigail showed me what was being said about it. A certain Henry Thoreau, a strange, radical soul living in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, had compared John Brown to Christ. "Some eighteen hundred years ago," Thoreau said, "Christ was crucified; this morning perchance Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of the chain which is not without its links. He is not old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.... I foresee the time when a painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject. The poet will sing it, the historian will record it; and with the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown."

Could it be possible that this Captain Brown should have his Pinturicchio? Well, might it not be so since Victor Hugo, living in exile, had also given Brown an apotheosis? Abigail also had Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, who was preaching the doctrine of brotherhood, democracy, resistance to the law.

"What sort of country is this?" I asked Abigail. "Can every one set himself up as a judge of the laws and disobey them if he chooses? If you had heard Douglas' speech you would be convinced that this sort of mania will cease or there will be war. Even Emerson is among these idealistic rebels, for he says that it is a lack of health to cry 'madman' at a hero as he passes. I think the Bible is responsible for much of this turmoil and foolish rebellion, if not all of it. Lincoln founded his campaign upon the Bible: a house divided against itself cannot stand. And just because Christ is taken as divine, every word and act of his is lived up to by some madman as justification for acts like those of Brown."

In the meantime Abigail had found among her papers the words of Victor Hugo: "He is not a New Englander," she said, "nor an American idealist. And he says—I'll translate it for you: 'In killing Brown the Southern States have committed a crime which will take its place among the calamities of history. The rupture of the Union will fatally follow the assassination of Brown. As to Brown, he was an apostle and a hero. The gibbet has only increased his glory and made him a martyr.'"

Well, was not Douglas a martyr too? Who had done more for his country? Was Lincoln any more radical than Douglas? Lincoln was defeated to be sure, but Douglas was penalized for what he had said in these debates. No sooner had he returned to Washington than he found himself deposed from the committee on territories. He was beginning to be a man without a party. He was paying for his ideas.