Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln's was a martyrdom waiting to happen, and his portraits show it. For myself I do not much like the look of him in his youth or young manhood, with his hair smarmed down and his eyes sharp. Even when he had grown his beard and assumed his final persona, there often seems to me something too calculating about his face, something almost sly. But as the decades passed, and time after time he went down to Brady's studio for another sitting, to my mind a true beauty entered his features. A sad, resigned kindness cleared his eyes and mouth of cunning then, and he began to look as though all the world's sufferings, all his own anxieties, had scoured any resentment from his soul.