104 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 rash- 

 ness, and to find reasons of settled gravity for the happy 

 inspiration of his heart. He cites the evidence of Judge 

 Sedgwick, 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 before- 

 hand. If love were not too cunning for that, w^hat 

 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 " was not very imjDressible by music " ! 

 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 " not hand- 

 some " ; 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 pri- 

 vately the most respectable, publicly the least sagacious, 

 among all those which undei different names have 



