Lincoln's Melancholy

[Eva Elisabeth]

I think Orville H. Browning, who knew Abraham Lincoln well, probably assesssed spot-on: “He had his moods like other men. He was sometimes jolly and genial, and gain at other times absorbed and abstracted – but these alternations were only manifestations of his constitutional temperament – they came and went irregularly. He was sometimes mirthful and sometimes sad, but both moods quickly passed away and left him always the same man.”