A happy spring and summer followed.  All their friends took an interest in the lovers, and their prospects seemed bright.  But Anne’s health began to fail.  She could not rid herself of her haunting memories.  There was a possibility that she had wronged McNamar.  What if he should love her still, and should return and find her wedded to another?  Had she wronged both men?  In her thoughts was perpetual conflict.  The old love still persisted.  Her conscience troubled her.  She doubted, and was morbidly melancholy.  All this wore upon her; she fell ill.  At last her condition became grave, then hopeless.  Lincoln was sent for.  Anne’s last hour was passed alone with him.  She died at sunset, August 25, 1835.  An old neighbor who saw Lincoln just after his parting with the dying girl says:  “There were signs of the most terrible distress in his face.  His grief became frantic.  He lost all self-control, even the consciousness of his own identity; and his closest friends in New Salem pronounced him insane, crazy, mad.  They watched him with especial vigilance on dark and stormy days.  At such times he raved piteously, often saying, ’I can never be reconciled to having the snow fall and the rain beat upon her grave.’” His old friend, Bowlin Greene, alone seemed possessed of the power to quiet him.  He took him to his own home and kept him for several weeks, an object of undisguised solicitude.  At last it seemed safe to permit him to return to his old haunts.  Greene urged him to go back to the law; and he did so, but he was never the same man again.  He was thin, haggard, and careworn.  He was as one who had been at the brink of the grave.  A long time afterward, when the grass had for nearly thirty years grown over the grave of Anne Rutledge, Lincoln was one day introduced to a man named Rutledge in the White House.  He looked at him a moment, then grasped his hand and said with deep feeling:  “I love the name of Rutledge to this day.  Anne was a lovely girl.  She was natural, well-educated.  She would have made a good, loving wife.  I did honestly and truly love her, and I think often, often of her now.”  Mr. Herndon has said that the love and the death of this young girl shattered Lincoln’s purposes and tendencies.  “He threw off his infinite sorrow only by leaping wildly into the political arena.  He needed whip and spur to save him from despair.”

The period of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood and youth had closed when he stood by the grave of Anne Rutledge.  He had long been a man in stature.  He was now a man in years; yet the rough path he had been forced to travel had made his progress toward maturity painfully slow.  In spite of his low birth, of his dire poverty, of the rudeness and illiteracy of his associates, of the absence of refinement in his surroundings, of his scanty means of education, of his homely figure and awkward manners, of his coarse fare and shabby dress, he dared to believe there was an exalted career in store for him.  He hewed