Lincoln | Page 6

their one deep joy in the hunt. In lesser degree, they enjoyed the
revivals which gave to the women their one escape out of themselves.
A strange, almost terrible recovery of the primitive, were those
religious furies of the days before the great forest had disappeared.
What other figures in our history are quite so remarkable as the
itinerant frontier priests, the circuit-riders as they are now called, who
lived as Elijah did, whose temper was very much the temper of Elijah,
in whose exalted narrowness of devotion, all that was stern, dark,
foreboding--the very brood of the forest's innermost heart--had found a
voice. Their religion was ecstasy in homespun, a glory of violent
singing, the release of a frantic emotion, formless but immeasurable,
which at all other times, in the severity of the forest routine, gave no
sign of its existence.
A visitor remembered long afterward a handsome young woman who
he thought was Nancy Hanks, singing wildly, whirling about as may
once have done the ecstatic women of the woods of Thrace, making her
way among equally passionate worshipers, to the foot of the rude altar,
and there casting herself into the arms of the man she was to marry.[6]
So did thousands of forest women in those seasons when their
communion with a mystic loneliness was confessed, when they gave
tongue as simply as wild creatures to the nameless stirrings and
promptings of that secret woodland where Pan was still the lord. And
the day following the revival, they were again the silent, expressionless,
much enduring, long-suffering forest wives, mothers of many children,
toilers of the cabins, who cooked and swept and carried fuel by sunlight,
and by firelight sewed and spun.
It can easily be understood how these women, as a rule, exerted little
influence on their sons. Their imaginative side was too deeply hidden,

the nature of their pleasures too secret, too mysterious. Male youth,
following its obvious pleasure, went with the men to the hunt The
women remained outsiders. The boy who chose to do likewise, was the
incredible exception. In him had come to a head the deepest things in
the forest life: the darkly feminine things, its silence, its mysticism, its
secretiveness, its tragic patience. Abraham was such a boy. It is said
that he astounded his father by refusing to own a gun. He earned
terrible whippings by releasing animals caught in traps. Though he had
in fullest measure the forest passion for listening to stories, the
ever-popular tales of Indian warfare disgusted him. But let the tale take
on any glint of the mystery of the human soul--as of Robinson Crusoe
alone on his island, or of the lordliness of action, as in Columbus or
Washington--and he was quick with interest. The stories of talking
animals out of Aesop fascinated him.
In this thrilled curiosity about the animals was the side of him least
intelligible to men like his father. It lives in many anecdotes: of his
friendship with a poor dog he had which he called "Honey"; of
pursuing a snake through difficult thickets to prevent its swallowing a
frog; of loitering on errands at the risk of whippings to watch the
squirrels in the tree-tops; of the crowning offense of his childhood,
which earned him a mighty beating, the saving of a fawn's life by
scaring it off just as a hunter's gun was leveled. And by way of
comment on all this, there is the remark preserved in the memory of
another boy to whom at the time it appeared most singular, "God might
think as much of that little fawn as of some people." Of him as of
another gentle soul it might have been said that all the animals were his
brothers and sisters.[7]
One might easily imagine this peculiar boy who chose to remain at
home while the men went out to slay, as the mere translation into
masculinity of his mother, and of her mothers, of all the converging
processions of forest women, who had passed from one to another the
secret of their mysticism, coloring it many ways in the dark vessels of
their suppressed lives, till it reached at last their concluding child. But
this would only in part explain him. Their mysticism, as after-time was
to show, he had undoubtedly inherited. So, too, from them, it may be,

came another characteristic--that instinct to endure, to wait, to abide the
issue of circumstance, which in the days of his power made him to the
politicians as unintelligible as once he had been to the forest huntsmen.
Nevertheless, the most distinctive part of those primitive women, the
sealed passionateness of their spirits, he never from childhood to the
end revealed. In the grown man appeared a quietude, a sort of tranced
calm, that was