One wonders if perhaps he sang to himself, or thought of music, when he rode his horse, when he rode in the rain when there was sound all about him and no one to eavesdrop effectively. He would have heard a fair amount of homegrown music in all the places he had lived, out on the circuit court road and elsewhere. At Antietam he had Lamon play banjo for him, to, as he said, let him laugh to keep him from otherwise crying. And so it doesn't take too much of a fancy to think that he let his mind wander toward music as he rode. He loved poetry. He loved cadence. He loved the things of emotion.

And so there is an inherent musicality in his great addresses, a tapping, a listening to the music that is in nature.