Is there anything more unknowable than a politician's soul? Even a figure as exhaustively documented as Abraham Lincoln -- whole tomes have been devoted to his marriage, his melancholy, his hats -- remains in some essential way a mystery, the private man subsumed by two-plus centuries of folklore and iconography. But he was of course a person who lived and loved and grieved like any other -- and like his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, found perhaps some solace in the prospect of an afterworld still reachable from this one.