92 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



for he saw, wooed, and won in a week. In later life he 

 tried in a most amusing way to account for this rashness, 

 and to find reasons of settled gravity for the happy inspira 

 tion of his heart. He cites the evidence of Judge Sedg- 

 wick, 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 &quot;was not very impressible by 

 music ! &quot; 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 that his mother was &quot; not handsome ; &quot; 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 the 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 Tories our 

 politics have ever produced, whose conservatism truly repre 

 sented an idea, and not a mere selfish interest men who 

 honestly distrusted democracy, and stood up for experience, 



