heart. He cites the
evidence of Judge Sedgwick, of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Wolcott, of the Rev.
Dr. Smith, and others, to the wisdom of his choice. But it does not
appear that he consulted them beforehand. If love were not too cunning
for that, what would become of the charming idyl, renewed in all its
wonder and freshness for every generation? Let us be thankful that in
every man's life there is a holiday of romance, an illumination of the
senses by the soul, that makes him a poet while it lasts. Mr. Quincy
caught the enchantment through his ears, a song of Burns heard from the
next room conveying the infection,--a fact still inexplicable to him
after lifelong meditation thereon, as he "was not very impressible by
music"! To us there is something very characteristic in this rapid
energy of Mr. Quincy, something very delightful in his naive account of
the affair. It needs the magic of no Dr. Heidegger to make these dried
roses, that drop from between the leaves of a volume shut for seventy
years, bloom again in all their sweetness. Mr. Edmund Quincy tells us
his mother was "not handsome"; but those who remember the gracious
dignity of her old age will hardly agree with him. She must always have
had that highest kind of beauty which grows more beautiful with years,
and keeps the eyes young, as if with a sort of partial connivance of
Time.

We do not propose to follow Mr. Quincy closely through his whole public
life, which, beginning with his thirty-second, ended with his
seventy-third year. He entered Congress as the representative of a party
privately the most respectable, publicly the least sagacious, among all
those which under different names have divided the country. The
Federalists were the only proper tones our politics have ever produced,
whose conservatism truly represented an idea, and not a mere selfish
interest,--men who honestly distrusted democracy, and stood up for
experience, or the tradition which they believed for such, against
empiricism. During his Congressional career, the government was little
more than an _attache_ of the French legation, and the opposition to
which he belonged a helpless _revenant_ from the dead and buried
Colonial past. There are some questions whose interest dies the moment
they are settled; others, into which a moral element enters that hinders
them from being settled, though they may be decided. It is hard to
revive any enthusiasm about the _Embargo_, though it once could inspire