Another evident quality of such a character as this will be its
freshness or newness; if we may so speak. Its freshness or
readiness--call it what you will--its ability to take up new duties and
do them in a new way, will result of necessity from its truth and
clearness. The simple natures and forces will always be the most pliant
ones. Water bends and shapes itself to any channel. Air folds and adapts
itself to each new figure. They are the simplest and the most infinitely
active things in nature. So this nature, in very virtue of its
simplicity, must be also free, always fitting itself to each new need.
It will always start from the most fundamental and eternal conditions,
and work in the straightest even although they be the newest ways, to
the present prescribed purpose. In one word, it must be broad and
independent and radical. So that freedom and radicalness in the
character of Abraham Lincoln were not separate qualities, but the
necessary results of his simplicity and childlikeness and truth.
Here then we have some conception of the man. Out of this character came
the life which we admire and the death which we lament to-day. He was
called in that character to that life and death. It was just the nature,
as you see, which a new nation such as ours ought to produce. All the
conditions of his birth, his youth, his manhood, which made him what he
was, were not irregular and exceptional, but were the normal conditions
of a new and simple country.
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