midnight
Abraham Lincoln is , strictly speaking , more than a legend ; he has become a cult . Immediately after his death he lived in the national mind for a time as primarily a martyr ; then emphasis shifted to his humor and a whole literature of waggish tales and retorts and apologues assembled around his name ; then he passed into a more sentimental zone and endless stories were multiplied about his natural piety and his habit of pardoning innocent offenders . Out of the efflorescence of all these aspects of legend which accompanied the centenary of his birth there has since seemed to be emerging -- though the older aspects still persist as well -- a conception of him as a figure at once lofty and familiar , at once sad and witty , at once Olympian and human . Among poets of all grades of opinion Lincoln is the chief native hero : Edwin Arlington Robinson has best expressed in words as firm as bronze the Master 's reputation for lonely pride and forgiving laughter ; John Gould Fletcher , with an eloquence found nowhere else in his work , likens Lincoln to a tree so mighty that its branches reach the heavens and its roots the primal rock and nations of men may rest in its shade ; Edgar Lee Masters , whose work is full of the shadow and light of Lincoln , has made his most moving lyric an epitaph upon Ann Rutledge , the girl Lincoln loved and lost ; and Vachel Lindsay , in Lincoln 's own Springfield , during the World War thought of him as so stirred even in death by the horrors which then alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down the midnight streets , mourning and brooding . It is precisely thus , in other ages , that saints are said to appear at difficult moments , to quiet the waves or turn the arrow aside . Without these more vulgar manifestations Lincoln nevertheless lives as the founder of every cult lives , in the echoes of his voice on many tongues and in the vibrations of his voice in many affections . The novelists , unfortunately , fall behind the poets in the beauty and wisdom with which they celebrate the figure of Lincoln , though they have produced scores of volumes associated with it , upon the life not only of Lincoln himself but of his mother , of his children , of this or that friend or neighbor .