CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 519 



by liis personal presence, from the highest and purest motives. His 

 father wished him to do so ; his fellow citizens cast their eyes on him ; 

 his sense of duty to his country and the right deduced that there was 

 political work for him to do. He could no more have refused to work 

 with his pen and his tongue under such persuasions, than he could 

 have shut his ears to a trumpet note, or his eyes to the voltaic arch. 

 His career is a living example of the inherent difference between 

 inclination and adaptation to a special work. He did, and did well, 

 admirably, gloriously well, what it was his duty and his place to do, 

 — what his surroundings and his elements fitted him to do ; but his 

 tastes and his wishes were constantly laid aside, suppressed, one might 

 say crushed, in the stern sacrifice of inclination to obligation. In this 

 respect, his career is a most impressive lesson to our younger acade- 

 micians, — I do not mean members of this Academy only, but our 

 young students everywhere, who fancy they have ended the matter 

 when they say their actual pursuit is one of their own liking or selec- 

 tion. Still more in the character of the work he did, do I believe we 

 find a still closer lesson for ourselves, that we shall do well to ponder. 

 Mr. Adams's tastes, as I have said, were essentially those of a 

 scholar. His father stated of him more than once, that he was made 

 to be a hermit. He gathered around him a valuable library, even 

 before inheritius the larger and more miscellaneous collection of his 

 father, — and he loved to live in it. His delight was in what is called 

 standard or classical literature, — not merely the classics of the Latin 

 and Greek lan^uaofes, but those works in all the tongues of cultured 

 Europe that have gone through a process of sifting similar to that 

 through which the ancient classics have passed, — those which their 

 own and subsequent ages have alike found worth keeping. In the 

 perusal of these he was indefatigable. He could settle down in mid- 

 dle life to a thorough course of study with a systematic arrangement 

 of time, a settled purpose of labor, a patient grappling with difficul- 

 ties, which would do honor to a youth at college, laboring for the 

 scholarship on which his daily bread was to depend, — doubly hon- 

 orable in a man of wealth and assured social position, who could not 

 easily be called to account for ignorance or indolence, had such indeed 

 been his failings. I find in his diary mention of his studying at the 

 same time Persius, Goethe, Adam Smith, Gallatin, and the Duchess 

 d'Abrantes, a little of each at a time, with careful opinions noted on 

 their respective literary value. In such departments of literature — 

 history, biography, political and moral science, the higher kinds of 

 poetry and fiction — he was never tired of exercising his thoughts, and, 



