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.
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