high debate, and anxiety, and interest,
intense and universal, absorb them all. Suddenly the council is dissolved.
Silence is in the capitol, and sorrow has thrown its pall over the land.
What new event is this? Has some Cromwell closed the legislative
chambers? or has some Caesar, returning from his distant conquests, passed
the Rubicon, seized the purple, and fallen in the Senate beneath the
swords of self-appointed executioners of his country's vengeance? No!
nothing of all this. What means, then, this abrupt and fearful silence?
What unlooked for calamity has quelled the debates of the Senate and
calmed the excitement of the people? An old man, whose tongue once indeed
was eloquent, but now through age had well nigh lost its cunning, has
fallen into the swoon of death. He was not an actor in the drama of
conquest--nor had his feeble voice yet mingled in the lofty argument--

"A grey-haired sire, whose eye intent
Was on the visioned future bent."

And now he has dreamed out at last the troubled dream of life. Sighs of
unavailing grief ascend to Heaven. Panegyric, fluent in long-stifled
praise, performs its office. The army and the navy pay conventional
honors, with the pomp of national woe, and then the hearse moves onward.
It rests appropriately, on its way, in the hall where independence was
proclaimed, and again under the dome where freedom was born. At length the
tomb of JOHN ADAMS opens to receive a SON, who also, born a subject of a
king had stood as a representative of his emancipated country, before
principalities and powers, and had won by merit, and worn without
reproach, the honors of the Republic.

From that scene, so impressive in itself, and impressive because it never
before happened, and can never happen again, we have come up to this place
surrounded with the decent drapery of public mourning, on a day set apart
by authority, to recite the history of the citizen, who, in the ripeness
of age, and fulness of honors, has thus descended to his rest. It is fit
to do so, because it is by such exercises that nations regenerate their
early virtues and renew their constitutions. All nations must perpetually
renovate their virtues and their constitutions, or perish. Never was there
more need to renovate ours than now, when we seem to be passing from the
safe old policy of peace and moderation into a career of conquest and
martial renown. Never was the duty of preserving our free institutions in
all thei