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It was from those shingles that he learned, too, the place of the State in
this nationalism. Its paternalism has grown tremendously since 1824, when
democracy was a negative, a repressive and not a positive, aggressive
political and social spirit, but, as it was, it gave him the foundation of
the political structure within whose lines he had to build later.
And with all this was a self-discipline in the two great knowledges by
which men have climbed from savages to gods--language and mathematics. He
was told one day that there was an English grammar in a house six miles
from his home, and he at once walked off to borrow it. And he studied
geometry and algebra alone. This may seem to you an inconsequential thing,
but having myself on those same prairies not far away from the Sangamon
acquired my algebra with little teaching and my solid geometry with only
the tuition of a book and of the sun or a lamp, I am able to appreciate
what the hardship of that self-schooling was. It was more agreeable to
watch the clouds while the horses rested at the end of the furrow, to
address, as did Burns, lines to a field-mouse, or to listen to the song of
the meadow-lark, than to learn the habits of the three dimensions then
known, of points in motion, of lines in intersection, of surfaces in
revolution, or to represent the unknown by algebraic instead of poetic
symbols.
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