consented, when more than eighty,
to write a memoir of John Quincy Adams, to be published in the
"Proceedings" of the Massachusetts Historical Society, he was obliged to
excuse himself. On account of his age? Not at all, but because the work
had grown to be a volume under his weariless hand. _Ohne Hast ohne
Rast_, was as true of him as of Goethe. We find the explanation of his
accomplishing so much in a rule of life which he gave, when President,
to a young man employed as his secretary, and who was a little
behindhand with his work: "When you have a number of duties to perform,
always do the most disagreeable one first." No advice could have been
more in character.

Perhaps the most beautiful part of Mr. Quincy's life was his old age.
What in most men is decay, was in him but beneficent prolongation and
adjournment. His interest in affairs unabated, his judgment undimmed,
his fire unchilled, his last years were indeed "lovely as a Lapland
night." Till within a year or two of its fall, there were no signs of
dilapidation in that stately edifice. Singularly felicitous was Mr.
Winthrop's application to him of Wordsworth's verses:--

"The monumental pomp of age
Was in that goodly personage."

Everything that Macbeth foreboded the want of, he had in deserved
abundance,--the love, the honor, the obedience, the troops of friends.
His equanimity was beautiful. He loved life, as men of large vitality
always do, but he did not fear to lose life by changing the scene of it.
Visiting him in his ninetieth year with a friend, he said to us, among
other things: "I have no desire to die, but also no reluctance. Indeed,
I have a considerable curiosity about the other world. I have never been
to Europe, you know." Even in his extreme senescence there was an April
mood somewhere in his nature "that put a spirit of youth in everything."
He seemed to feel that he could draw against an unlimited credit of
years. When eighty-two, he said smilingly to a young man just returned
from a foreign tour, "Well, well, I mean to go myself when I am old
enough to profit by it." We have seen many old men whose lives were mere
waste and desolation, who made longevity disreputable by their untimely
persistence in it; but in Mr. Quincy's length of years there was nothing
that was not venerable. To him it was fulfilment, not deprivation; the
days were marked to the last for what they brought, not for what they
took away.

The memory of what Mr.