Excerpt from Indiana's Contribution to Abraham Lincoln: Address Delivered by Dr. Louis A. Warren on His Installation as an Honorary Companion of Indiana Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States at Foster Hall in Indianapolis on Thursday, September 28, 1944 Whose swelling tears in dewdrops fell Upon the listening ground. This reaction of a sixteen year old boy, who for the next five years lived under the spell of this tragedy, and found something in the Mournful Song that drew him from his bed before day break to drink its strains, is of far more importance than an attempt to trace the origin of Lincoln's melancholy to an alleged discovery of some skeleton in the Lincoln family closet, which is supposed to have worried Lincoln all his life; or, the purely fictitious narrative about Lincoln's collapse at the time of Ann Rutledge's death. The tragedy of this boyhood playmate prefaced by the death of his own mother, whose grave he could see each morning as he came from the cabin door, and supplemented by the death in childbirth of his only sister, might have been responsible for In diana's sending into Illinois, in 1830, a melancholy man. The blending of melancholy and mirth seems to have been a peculiar lifelong practice of Lincoln and the last division of his long poem, inspired by his visit to his old Indiana home, as he stated is in lighter vein. He chose for the subject of this last canto, A Bear Hunt. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.