But in the case of Lincoln,
Shakespeare and the Bible served, not merely to awaken his taste and
fashion his style, but also to liberate his literary and moral
imagination. At the same time he was training his powers of thought by
an assiduous study of algebra and geometry. The absorbing hours he spent
over his Euclid were apparently of no use to him in his profession; but
Lincoln was in his way an intellectual gymnast and enjoyed the exertion
for its own sake. Such a use of his leisure must have seemed a sheer
waste of time to his more practical friends, and they might well have
accounted for his comparative lack of success by his indulgence in such
secret and useless pastimes. Neither would this criticism have been
beside the mark, for if Lincoln's great energy and powers of work had
been devoted exclusively to practical ends, he might well have become in
the early days a more prominent lawyer and politician than he actually
was. But he preferred the satisfaction of his own intellectual and
social instincts, and so qualified himself for achievements beyond the
power of a Douglas.
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