Homes of American Statesmen; With Anecdotical, Personal, and Descriptive Sketches. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
but it was spacious, richly furnished and commodious. The rarest treasures of literature adorned the library, and indeed every part bore witness to the affluence and cultivated pursuits of the venerable sage. A farm of some fourteen thousand acres lay about among the hills, which was laboriously and carefully husbanded, and which gave employment in various ways to a number of artificers and mechanics, whose dwellings were distributed about the slopes. His estate, in short, was a small and almost independent community in itself, capable of supplying the ordinary needs and even the luxuries of a highly civilized condition of social existence. As a proof of this, we may state by the way, that the carriage of the proprietor, as well as many of the tools and implements in daily use, had been manufactured on the premises. But the wonder of the place was the library, which was not only extensive, but extensively rich in its rare possessions, which the master had seduously collected during his long residence abroad from every nook and corner of Europe. Unfortunately many of these books, afterwards presented to Congress, were burned in the conflagration of the Capitol. Of the man himself, a guest, who was any thing but an admirer, has left this record.
"Dressed, within doors, as I saw him last, no longer in the red breeches, which were once famous as his favorite and rather conspicuous attire; but still vindicating by a sanguine waistcoat his attachment to that Republican color; in gray shorts, small silver kneebuckles, gray woollen stockings, black slippers, a blue body-coat, surmounted by a gray spencer; tall, and though lithe of person and decidedly graceful and agile of motion and carriage, yet long and ill-limbed, Mr. Jefferson's figure was commanding and striking, though bad, and his face most animated and agreeable, although remarkably ugly. His legs, by no means shunned observation; yet they were scarcely larger at the knee than in the ankle, and had never been conscious of a calf. Still, though without strength, they had always borne him along with vigor and suppleness. These bodily qualities and a health almost unfailing, he preserved, in a singular degree, to the very close of his long life. At the time I speak of, when he was in his eighty-first year, he not only mounted his horse without assistance and rode habitually some ten miles a day, but, dismounting at a fence breast-high, would leap over it, by only placing his hand on the topmost rail. He walked not only well and swiftly, but with a lightness and springiness of tread, such as few young men even have. It was a restless activity of mind, which informed all this unusual mobility of body; and the two, I think, were, in him, greatly alike. For his intellect had, like his person, more size than shape, more adroitness than force, more suppleness than solidity, and affected its ends by continuity of action not mass of power, by manipulation not muscularity. You may batter to pieces with a small hammer that which a cannon-ball would not shiver. He was never idle: nay, hardly a moment still. He rose early and was up late, through his life; and was all day, whenever not on foot or a-horse-back, at study, at work, or in conversation. If his legs and fingers were at rest, his tongue would sure to be a-going. Indeed, even when seated in his library in a low Spanish chair, he held forth to his visitors in an almost endless flow of fine discourse, his body seemed as impatient of keeping still as his mind, it shifted its position incessantly, and so twisted itself about that you might almost have thought he was attitudinizing. Meantime, his face, expressive as it was ugly, was not much less busy than his limbs, in bearing its part in the conversation, and kept up, all the while, the most speaking by-play, an eloquence of the countenance as great as ugly features could well have. It stood to his conversation like the artful help of well-imagined illustrations to the text of a book: a graphic commentary on every word, that was as convincing to the eyes as was his discourse to the ears. The impression which it conveyed was a strong auxiliary of all he uttered: for it begat in you an almost unavoidable persuasion of his sincerity."
Jefferson's conversation is described as the most agreeable and brilliant of his day; but was it this which gave him his personal power? He was not in other respects a man of any pre-eminent personal qualities; he did not possess commanding military skill; he was no orator, having seldom spoken in public; and though a good writer, he was not particularly distinguished in that line. His conversation, therefore, may have helped him in acquiring a mastery of the minds of men; but the real secret of his success consisted in two things – in his general superiority of intellect, and in his rich, generous, noble intuitions. He saw the truths and spoke the words, which the world wanted to see and hear, at the right time – a little in advance of his generation, but not too much in advance so as to "dwarf himself by the distance." His sympathetic genius beat responsive to the genius of his age. His instincts were the instincts of the men of his day; more decided and pronounced than theirs, but still recognized as a prophecy of what they felt the deepest and wanted the most. All the talent, all the cunning, all the selfish calculation of the world could not have enabled him to reach the heights which he attained by the simple and consistent utterance of his nature. He conquered, as Emerson says in speaking of the force of character over and above mere force of some special faculty, because his arrival any where altered the face of affairs. "Oh, Iole, how did you know that Hercules was a God?" "Because," answered Iole, "I was content the moment my eyes fell upon him. When I beheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses in the chariot race; but Hercules did not wait for a contest; he conquered whether he stood or walked, or sat, or whatever thing he did."
Happy in his life, Jefferson was no less happy in his death, for he went peacefully to rest on the fiftieth anniversary of the great day which he had done so much to make great, the Jubilee of our national freedom, – when the shouts of the people, as they ascended from the innumerable vales, to his receding ears, must have sounded as a prelude to the swelling voices of posterity.
HANCOCK
In the mouths of the people of New England, and indeed throughout the United States, the name of John Hancock has become a household word. In the State of Massachusetts, where he was born, lived, and died, and in the affairs of which he took, for five-and-twenty years, so very active and leading a part, he enjoyed a degree and a permanence of popularity never yet obtained by any other man. And yet we may observe and the same thing may be noted in other and more recent instances – a remarkable fact that deserves to be pondered – that his high degree of popularity was not at all dependent upon any peculiar embodiment or manifestation on his part of the more prevailing and characteristic traits of the community about him. Indeed the popular favor which Hancock enjoyed would seem to have been determined, as the attachment of individuals so often is, and as has happened also in other notable instances, rather by the attraction of opposites.
And yet Hancock's line of descent was such as might naturally enough have inspired the expectation of finding in him a good many more marks of the old puritan temper and manners than he ever exhibited. From the days of the first settlement of New England, down to the period of the Revolution and afterwards, the "ministers" constituted a sort of clerical nobility, enjoying a very high degree of influence and consideration; and it is to forefathers of that order, that a large part of the most distinguished and influential New England families may trace their origin. The elder sons of these ministers, commonly, and the younger ones often, were educated to the profession of their fathers, long regarded in New England as the most certain road to distinction, whether spiritual or temporal. But as the demand for ministers was limited, and as their families were generally pretty large, many of their sons found it necessary to engage in the avocations of civil life, in which they not uncommonly attained to wealth and high social positions. Yet, for the most part, however zealous and successful they might be in the pursuit of temporal objects, they still continued to exhibit pretty evident marks of their clerical descent and breeding in a certain stiff, cold, and austere gravity, if not, indeed, in a certain sanctimonious air even in the very act of concluding the very tightest and sharpest of bargains; – all the attributes, in fact, comprehensively and impressively conveyed to an inhabitant of New England by the title of Deacon, which office, as if still clinging to the horns of the altar, they often filled; thus becoming pillars and supports of that church of which their fathers had been the candlesticks.
The grandfather of John Hancock, himself called John, was for more than fifty years, as if by a sort of vaticination of the future, minister of Lexington, near to Concord; thus associating with that of Hancock another name, now to all American ears so familiar as the scene of the first revolutionary bloodshed. We are told by a biographer of this first John Hancock, that he possessed "a facetious temper," but in the grim old portrait which still hangs on the walls of his grandson's family mansion-house,