From Angels and Ages, Mr. Gopnik’s book on Lincoln and Darwin (who are linked by having both been born on the same day, February 12, 1809):

Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.

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Good writing is mostly good seeing and good thinking, too. It involves a whole view of life, and making that view sound so plausible that the reader adheres to it as obvious before he knows that it’s radical.

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(Their great contemporary Karl Marx had none of it; his views strike us as radical before we accept them as obvious. It is no accident—as a Marxist would say—that he criticized both Darwin and Lincoln for being too mundane and banal as stylists.)

That’s all one paragraph in the book, but I think splitting it out that way adds some clarity to the thoughts.

Above all, The Origin is a long argument meant for amateur readers, an effort at popular persuasion. It’s so well written that we don’t think of it as well written, just as Lincoln’s speeches are so well made that they seem to us as natural as pebbles on the beach. (We don’t think, “Well said!” We just think, “That’s right!”)

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(A)nyone writing an extended study of two very different men must always be haunted by Fluellen’s persuasive comparison, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, of Henry V and Alexander the Great: “There is a river in Macedon; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth—it is called Wye at Monmouth, but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but ’tis all one, ’tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.”

“There is salmons in both.” I really love that phrase.

(S)cholarship only matters when it makes students of us all.

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Lincoln summed up in one word was shrewd, a backwoods lawyer with a keen sense of human weakness and a knack for clever argument, colder than we would think, and more of a pol and even more of a wise guy than we would like him to be.

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What we wonder at is that a simple Springfield lawyer could become president; from (Lincoln’s) point of view, probably what was really amazing was that a cabin-born bumpkin had become a Springfield lawyer.

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Sure of himself even at the worst of the Civil War, (Lincoln) paced the floor, crying out not “What have I done?” but “What will the country say?”

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In backwoods Ohio, in the 1840s, William Dean Howells, Lincoln’s campaign biographer, recalled, “The village wits … liked to stand with their backs to our stove and challenge opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and Macaulay, Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare.”

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I mean liberalism here, and throughout this book, not in the American sense of well-meaning and wishy-washy, or the French sense of savagely devoted to the free market, but in the British sense, John Stuart Mill’s sense, in which an individual is committed, at the same time, to constitutional rule and individual freedom, to the power of the many and the free play of the mind—the sense that takes in a “conservative” in our politics just as well as a “liberal,” if not in a way more.

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The style they found to get heard was a new one, and one they shared. They were nearsighted visionaries. They knew how to inspire, but they knew how to argue first. They particularized in everything, and their general vision rises from the details, their big ideas from small sightings… They shared logic as a form of eloquence, argument as a style of virtue, close reasoning as a form of uplift.