Perhaps "Polk the plodder" was even more "hickory" than Jackson - pale, tough, hard, resilient, and shock resistent.
As for "young": Though in some way Polk's conduct was "adult" to the extreme, and though he already looked like an old man in his early fifties, his diary reveals that there was something "teen-age" about him until he died. It's a kind of "serious college-boy"-naivity that touched me deeply.
