THE CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON BY THOMAS JEFFERSON I think I knew General Washington intimately and thoroughly, and were I called on to delineate his character, it should be in terms like these: His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion. Hence the common remark of his officers, of the advantage he derived from councils of war, where, hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was best; and certainly no general ever planned his battles more judiciously. But if deranged during the course of the action, if any member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circumstances, he was slow in readjustment. The consequence was that he often failed in the field, and rarely against an enemy in station, as at Boston and New York. He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence; never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with his purpose whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known; no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, a good, and a great man. His temper was naturally irritable and high-toned; but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it. If ever, however, it broke its bounds, he was most tremendous in his wrath. In his expenses he was honorable, but exact; liberal in contributions to whatever promised utility, but frowning and unyielding on all visionary projects and all unworthy calls on his charity. His heart was not warm in its affections, but he exactly, calculated every man's value, and gave him a solid esteem proportioned to it. His person, you know, was fine; stature exactly what one would wish; his deportment easy, erect, and noble; the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback. Although in the circle of his friends, where he might be unreserved with safety, he took a free share in conversation, his colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither copiousness of ideas nor fluency of words. In public, when called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed; yet he wrote readily, rather diffusely, in an easy and correct style. This he had acquired by conversation with the world; for his education was merely reading, writing, and common arithmetic, to which he added surveying at a later day. His time was employed in action chiefly, reading little, and that only in agriculture and English history. His correspondence became necessarily extensive, and, with journalizing his agricultural proceedings, occupied most of his leisure hours within doors. On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect— in nothing bad, in a few points indifferent; and it may be truly said, that never did Nature and Fortune combine more completely to make a man great, and to place him in the same constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an everlasting remembrance. For his was the singular destiny and merit of leading the armies of his country successfully through an arduous war for the establishment of its independence, of conducting its councils through the birth of a government new in its forms and principles, until it had settled down into a quiet and orderly train, and of scrupulously obeying the laws through the whole of his career, civil and military: of which the history of the world furnishes no other example. From a private letter. TO THE DANDELION BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL The life of Lowell was rooted in the soil of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was born in 1819 in one of the pleasantest of its old houses called Elmwood, of Tory fame, where four generations of Lowells had preceded him, and whose "roomy ease" and, in summer, "cool and rustling privacy of leaves," were fit environment for a poet. "On the right, the smooth-gliding, circuitous Charles slipped through brown salt meadows to the sea." He was an imaginative child. In mature years he wrote, "Here I am in my garret. I slept here when I was a little, curly-headed boy, and used to see visions between me and the ceiling and dream the so-often recurring dream of having the earth put into my hand like an orange." learned his A, B, C's at a dame's school. Later at a school for boys, he pored over poetry, and liked to open the eyes of the little fellows with wonder-tales. As a young man he had only to go a pleasant walk to his University, old Harvard, where he seems first to have realized his calling, and in whose "arched alcoves" he extended the long list of literary friendships already formed in his father's library. The Biglow Papers, published in 1846, first drew public attention to him by their homely humor and strong spirit of freedom. In his wide life Lowell filled a chair at Harvard, was the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and served as United States minister both to Spain and Great Britain. companionable of men, keen and fine, healthy and high-spirited. Men and books and nature found rare response in his affection, nature chiefly as related to men, as the poem printed here suggests. He died at Elmwood in 1891. He was one of the most Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Which children pluck, and, full of pride, uphold, Which not the rich earth's ample round |