He was a student all his life. One incident that occurred in Springfield, some years before he finally left, will serve as an illustration.
An old German came through the town and claimed that he could teach us all to read and speak German in a few weeks. A class was organized for the purpose of studying German. Lincoln became a member of the class, and I also was in it, and I can see him yet going about with the German book in his pocket, studying it during his leisure moments in court and elsewhere. None of the rest of us learned much, but Lincoln mastered it, as he did every other subject which engaged his attention.
His home life was a pleasant one. I often visited at his home, and so far as my observation went, I do not hesitate to say that not the slightest credence should be given to the many false stories that have from time to time appeared, manufactured largely by those who desired to write something new and sensational concerning the life of President Lincoln in his home, and concerning Mrs. Lincoln.
Mr. Lincoln was regarded generally as an ungainly man, and so he was; and yet on occasions he appeared to me to be superior in dignity and nobility to almost any other man whom I have ever seen. I was present when the committee from the National Convention, that gave his first nomination for President, came to Springfield to notify him of his nomination. He stood in the rear of a double parlor in his home, and as the Hon. George F. Ashmun, president of the convention, presented the members of the delegation one by one to him, I thought that he looked what he was--the superior of any man present. Many of the eminent men composing that delegation had believed that Lincoln was some sort of a monster. I stood among them after they had met him and listened to their comments. The lofty character, the towering strength, the majesty of the man had made a great impression upon them. They had come expecting to see a freak; they discovered one of the princes of men.
In this connection, I must be permitted to refer to another occasion. It so happened that I was in Washington when the President's son Willie died. The funeral ceremony took place in the East Room of the White House, in the presence of the President and his cabinet and a few other friends. When the ceremony was about concluded and President Lincoln stood by the bier of his dead boy, with tear- drops falling from his face, surrounded by Seward, Chase, Bates, and others, I thought I never beheld a nobler-looking man. He was at that time truly, as he appeared, a man of sorrow, acquainted with grief, possessing the power and responsibilities of a President of a great Nation, yet with quivering lips and face bedewed with tears, from personal sorrow.