"Where only one or two were present he was fond of reading aloud. He passed many of the summer evenings in this way when occupying his cottage at the Soldiers' Home.
"He read Shakespeare more than all other writers together. He made no attempt to keep pace with the ordinary literature of the day. Sometimes he read a scientific work with keen appreciation, but he pursued no systematic course. He owed less to reading than most men. He delighted in Burns; of Thomas Hood he was also excessively fond. He often read aloud 'The Haunted House.' He would go to bed with a volume of Hood in his hands, and would sometimes rise at midnight and, traversing the long halls of the Executive Mansion in his night-clothes, would come to his secretary's room and read aloud something that especially pleased him. He wanted to share his enjoyment of the writer; it was dull pleasure for him to laugh alone. He read Bryant and Whittier with appreciation; there were many poems of Holmes that he read with intense relish. 'The Last Leaf' was one of his favorites; he knew it by heart, and used often to repeat it with deep feeling."
Ben: Perley Poore, in his reminiscences, says, "The White House, while Mr. Lincoln occupied it, was a fertile field for news, which he was always ready to give those correspondents in whom he had confidence, but the surveillance of the press--first by Secretary Seward and then by Secretary Stanton--was as annoying as it was inefficient. A censorship of all matter filed at the Washington office of the telegraph, for transmission to different Northern cities, was exercised by a succession of ignorant individuals, some of whom had to be hunted up at whiskey shops when their signature of approval was desired. A Congressional investigation showed how stupidly the censors performed their duty. Innocent sentences which were supposed to have a hidden meaning were stricken from paragraphs, which were thus rendered nonsensical, and information was rejected that was clipped in print from the Washington papers, which it was known regularly found their way into 'Dixie.'
"When irate correspondents appealed to Mr. Lincoln, he would good-naturedly declare that he had no control over his secretaries, and would endeavor to mollify their wrath by telling them a story. One morning in the winter of 1862, when two angry journalists had undertaken to explain the annoyances of the censorship, Mr. Lincoln, who had listened in his dreamy way, finally said,--