ms speaks of those young people who rarely like
the Romanesque. "They prefer the Gothic.... No doubt, they are right, since
they are young: but men and women who have lived long and are tired--who
want rest--who have done with aspirations and ambitions--_whose life has
been a broken arch_--feel this repose and self-restraint as they feel
nothing else." The _Education_ is in fact the record, tragic and pathetic
underneath its genial irony, of the defeat of fine aspirations and laudable
ambitions. It is the story of a life which the man himself, in his old age,
looked back upon as a broken arch.

[Footnote 17: _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_, p. 7. [Author's note.]]

One is not surprised that a man of Henry Adams's antecedents should take
life seriously; but no sane man, looking upon his career from the outside,
would call it a failure. Born into a family whose traditions were in
themselves a liberal education, Henry Adams enjoyed advantages in youth
such as few boys have. It was at least an unusual experience to be able, as
a lad, to sit every Sunday "behind a President grandfather, and to read
over his head the tablet in memory of a President great-grandfather, who
had 'pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor' to secure the
independence of his country." This to be sure might not have been an
advantage if it led the lad to regard the presidency as a heritable office
in the family; but it was certainly a great deal to be able to listen
daily, at his father's table, to talk as good as he was "ever likely to
hear again." This was doubtless one of the reasons why he got (or was it
only that it seemed so to him in his old age?) so little from Harvard
College; but at any rate he graduated with honors, and afterwards enjoyed
the blessed boon of two care-free years of idling and study in Germany and
Italy. For six years, as private secretary to his father on one of the most
difficult and successful diplomatic missions in the history of his country,
he watched history in the making, and gained an inside knowledge of English
politics and society such as comes to one young man in ten thousand.
Returning to America, he served for a time as editor of the _North
American_, and was for seven years a professor of history in Harvard
College. During the last thirty-five years of his life, he lived
alternately in Washington and Paris. Relieved of official or other
responsibility, he travelled all over the world, met the most in