January 30, 1842.
MY DEAR SPEED:—Feeling, as you know I do, the deepest solicitude for
the success of the enterprise you are engaged in, I adopt this as the
last method I can adopt to aid you, in case (which God forbid!) you
shall need any aid. I do not place what I am going to say on paper
because I can say it better that way than I could by word of mouth, but,
were I to say it orally before we part, most likely you would forget
it at the very time when it might do you some good. As I think it
reasonable that you will feel very badly some time between this and the
final consummation of your purpose, it is intended that you shall read
this just at such a time. Why I say it is reasonable that you will feel
very badly yet, is because of three special causes added to the general
one which I shall mention.
The general cause is, that you are naturally of a nervous temperament;
and this I say from what I have seen of you personally, and what you
have told me concerning your mother at various times, and concerning
your brother William at the time his wife died. The first special cause
is your exposure to bad weather on your journey, which my experience
clearly proves to be very severe on defective nerves. The second is the
absence of all business and conversation of friends, which might divert
your mind, give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which
will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the
bitterness of death. The third is the rapid and near approach of that
crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings concentrate.
If from all these causes you shall escape and go through triumphantly,
without another “twinge of the soul,” I shall be most happily but most
egregiously deceived. If, on the contrary, you shall, as I expect you
will at sometime, be agonized and distressed, let me, who have some
reason to speak with judgment on such a subject, beseech you to ascribe
it to the causes I have mentioned, and not to some false and ruinous
suggestion of the Devil.
“But,” you will say, “do not your causes apply to every one engaged in
a like undertaking?” By no means. The particular causes, to a greater
or less extent, perhaps do apply in all cases; but the general
one,—nervous debility, which is the key and conductor of all
the particular ones, and without which they would be utterly
harmless,—though it does pertain to you, does not pertain to one in a
thousand. It is out of this that the painful difference between you and
the mass of the world springs.
I know what the painful point with you is at all times when you are
unhappy; it is an apprehension that you do not love her as you should.
What nonsense! How came you to court her? Was it because you thought she
deserved it, and that you had given her reason to expect it? If it was
for that why did not the same reason make you court Ann Todd, and at
least twenty others of whom you can think, and to whom it would apply
with greater force than to her? Did you court her for her wealth? Why,
you know she had none. But you say you reasoned yourself into it. What
do you mean by that? Was it not that you found yourself unable to reason
yourself out of it? Did you not think, and partly form the purpose, of
courting her the first time you ever saw her or heard of her? What had
reason to do with it at that early stage? There was nothing at that time
for reason to work upon. Whether she was moral, amiable, sensible,
or even of good character, you did not, nor could then know, except,
perhaps, you might infer the last from the company you found her in.
All you then did or could know of her was her personal appearance and
deportment; and these, if they impress at all, impress the heart, and
not the head.
Say candidly, were not those heavenly black eyes the whole basis of all
your early reasoning on the subject? After you and I had once been at
the residence, did you not go and take me all the way to Lexington and
back, for no other purpose but to get to see her again, on our return
on that evening to take a trip for that express object? What earthly
consideration would you take to find her scouting and despising you, and
giving herself up to another? But of this you have no apprehension; and
therefore you cannot bring it home to your feelings.
I shall be so anxious about you that I shall want you to write by every
mail.
Your friend, LINCOLN.