Rather than savoring his progress, he excoriated himself for not achieving enough. "I feel humbled and mortified," he wrote in his diary, as the year 1829 drew to a close, "by the conviction that the Creator has gifted me with intelligence almost in vain. I am almost twenty two and have as yet attained but the threshold of knowledge... The night has seldom found me much advanced beyond the station I occupied in the morning... I almost despair of ever making any figure in the world."

-Doris Kearns Goodwin, regarding Salmon P. Chase

It sounds absurd from the mouth of Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury. But then, he had thirty years to go.