Free Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser Page B

Weems’s Life teaching young George about God’s bounty.
    Paine is half right. The world is a good place—except when it’s not. What of the many coughs and rattles in the machinery of the universe—floods, famines, droughts, plagues, eruptions, earthquakes? What of the one-on-one disasters and retail catastrophes that fill every life—the death of Paine’s first wife? The deaths of Nancy Lincoln, Sarah Grigsby, and Ann Rutledge? Paine, from conviction or temperament, heroism or stupidity, looked the other way. Lincoln could not.
    As with the world, so with fathers. Paine’s outrage over the substitutionary atonement sprang from his horror at the notion that a good father could sacrifice a son in payment for sin. Any father who did it, he was certain, “would be hanged.” On the question of what fathers would or would not do, Lincoln reserved judgment.
    To find reflections of nature’s darkness, and his own, Lincoln turned instead to poetry. He missed many of the great poets of his time: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman never stirred his interest. His favorite poem, disconcertingly, was “Mortality,” a lugubrious meditation on the vanity of human wishes by William Knox, a Scotsman who had died in 1825. Lincoln read it in New Salem, committed it to memory, and would recite it in later years. “I would give all I am worth, and go in debt,” he once declared, “to be able to write so fine a piece as Ithink that is.” More to his credit was his love of Robert Burns, whom he admired for his satire; “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” a send-up of a canting hypocrite, was a particular favorite of his.
    A third discovery in New Salem was Lord Byron. It is hard now to understand what Byron was to the early nineteenth century. He was botha poet and a personality, an actor and a hero. He was beautiful, glamorous, rich, witty, and damned—an irresistible combination. Byron’s politics were not unlike Paine’s—he was a liberty-loving aristocrat who died in 1824 fighting to free Greece from the Ottoman Empire. But, unlike Paine, or any other Enlightenment figure, he had access to all the dark emotions—depression, despair, nihilism, madness. The ease of his access makes us now suspect that he was a bit of a poseur. Lincoln, like most of his contemporaries, loved him; when he was on the road, he would look up favorite passages in other people’s volumes of Byron (other peoplealways had them).
    Towering over all was Shakespeare. Lincoln never readall the plays. This was characteristic of his learning; he was less well read than many a professor or even journalist, but what he read he read deeply. His favorites were the plays in minor keys—the tragedies and the histories (though Shakespeare designed the histories to end well—springtime for Tudors—there is a lot of grimness along the way). Lincoln’s favorite of favorites was Macbeth , the play that is set in motion by witches.
    In his late twenties and thirties, Lincoln wrote poems of his own, all sad. One, “The Suicide’s Soliloquy,” was thought to have been removed from the files of the Sangamo Journal , the local newspaper that ran it, as if to spare Lincoln from being associated with such a grim topic.A scholar rediscovered it, however, in 2004. One stanza will suffice:
    Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,
    And this the place to do it:
    This heart I’ll rush a dagger through,
    Though I in hell should rue it!
    Lincoln failed utterly to match his words to the sentiments he wished to evoke. The rhyme of “do it” and “rue it” is like rolling barrels down a staircase.
    Probably his best touch as a poet came in “The Bear Hunt,” a long description of a wild bear being run down and killed by mounted hunters and baying dogs. As the chase reaches a clamorous pitch, Lincoln,whose sympathies are with the bear, drops in this mordant little line: “The world’salive with fun.” Only a humorist could be that black.
    Lincoln loved