Contemporary New York Times on Abraham Lincoln (with ironically overburdened language):
What is still better than even felicity of expression, is felicity of thought. Not only the President’s language is the aptest expression of his ideas, but there is a similar fitness of his ideas to the occasion. He has a singular faculty of discovering the real relations of things, and shaping his thoughts strictly upon them, without external bias. In his own independent, and perhaps we might say very peculiar, way, he invariably gets at the needed truth of the time. When he writes, it is always said that “he hits the nail upon the head,” and so he does; but the beauty of it is that the nail which he hits is sure to be the very nail of all others which needs driving.