The moment Mr. Jefferson received this intelligence he again wrote to his friend Rush:

"This is enough for me. I only needed this knowledge to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives. Changing a single word only in Dr. Franklin's character of him, I knew him to be always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes incorrect and precipitate in his judgments and it is known to those who have ever heard me speak of Mr. Adams, that I have ever done him justice myself, and defended him when assailed by others, with the single exception as to his political opinions. But with a man possessing so many other estimable qualities, why should we be dissocialized by mere differences of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, or any thing else. His opinions are as honestly formed as my own. Our different views of the same subject are the result of a difference in our organization and experience. I never withdrew from the society of any man on this account, al though many have done it from me; much less should I do it from one with whom I had gone through, with hand and heart, so many trying scenes. I wish, therefore, but for an apposite occasion to express to Mr. Adams my unchanged affections for him. There is an awkwardness which hangs over the resuming a correspondence so long discontinued, unless something could arise which should call for a letter. Time and chance may perhaps generate such an occasion, of which I shall not be wanting in promptitude to avail myFrom this fusion of mutual affections, Mrs. Adams is of course separated. It will only be necessary that I never name her. In your letters to Mr. Adams, you can, perhaps, suggest my continued cordiality towards him, and knowing this, should an occasion of writing first present itself to him, he will perhaps avail himself of it, as I certainly will, should it first occur to me. No ground for jealousy now existing, he will certainly give fair play to the natural warmth of his heart. Perhaps I may open the way in some letter to my old friend Gerry, who I know is in habits of the greatest intimacy with him.

self.

"I have thus, my friend, laid open my heart to you, because you were so kind as to take an interest in healing again revolutionary affections, which have ceased in expression only, but not in their existence. God ever bless you, and preserve you in life and health.”

In the course of another month, these two immortal Patriarchs of the Revolution were affectionately brought together, after a ten years' suspension of all friendly intercommunication. The correspondence which passed between them, on the restitution of their ancient cordiality, is one of the most interesting and affecting legacies ever bequeathed to the world. It has been well described, as resembling more than any thing else, one of those conversations it

the Elysium of the ancients which the shades of the departed great were supposed to hold, with regard to the affairs of the world they had left. That correspondence was a great sweetener of their departing years, blending the apothegms of Science, Morality and Religion, and the warmest effusions of reciprocal love and admiration, with sportive reminiscencies on their past agitations, rivalries, mutual follies, mistakes, and misconceptions. And coming, as it did, from the Chiefs of the antagonist parties which have divided the nation from its birth, it reads an awful lesson of reprehension on that fellness of party spirit, which has overspread the land with a scourge of dissocialization, splitting neighborhoods into repulsive coteries and combinations, and rending asunder families and friends. Mr. Jefferson's part, or probably the greatest portion of it, has already been given to the world, and would make a volume of itself. A few disjointed fragments, of the personal and desultory kind, taken promiscuously from his letters of different dates, are all that can be expected to enter into this general view of the correspondence.

"A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind. It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow-laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us, and yet passing harmless under our bark, we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port. Still we did not expect to be without rubs and difficulties; and we have had them. First the detention of the western posts: then the coalition of Pilnitz, outlawing our commerce with France, and the British enforcement of the outlawry. In your day, French depredations: in mine, English, and the Berlin and Milan decrees: now, the English orders of council, and the piracies they authorise. When these shall be over, it will be the impressment of our seamen, or something else: and so we have gone on, and so we shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man. And I do believe we shall continue. to growl, to multiply and prosper, until we exhibit an association. powerful, wise, and happy, beyond what has yet been seen by men."

"I have thus stated my opinion on a point on which we differ, not with a view to controversy, for we are both too old to change opinions which are the result of a long life of enquiry and reflection; but on the suggestion of a former letter of yours, that we ought not. to die before we have explained ourselves to each other. We acted in perfect harmony, through a long and perilous contest for our liberty and independence. A constitution has been acquired, which,

though neither of us thinks perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone. If we do not think exactly alike as to its imperfections, it matters little to our country, which, after devoting to it long lives of disinterested labor, we have delivered over to our successors in life, who will be able to take care of it aod of themselves."

"I learned with great regret the serious illness mentioned in your letter; and I hope Mr. Rives will be able to tell me you are entirely restored. Bat our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for a while, all will at length surcease motion. Our watches, with works of brass and steel, wear out within that period. Shall you and I last to see the course the seven-fold wonders of the times will take? The Attila of the age dethroned, the ruthless destroyer of ten millions of the human race, whose thirst for blood appeared unquenchable, the great oppressor of the rights and liberties of the worlà, shut up within the circuit of a little island of the Mediterranean, and dwindling to the condition of an humble and degraded pensioner on the bounty of those he has most injured. How miserably, how meanly, has he closed his inflated career! What a sample of the batros will his history present! He should have perished on the swords of his enemies under the walls of Paris."

"You ask, if I would agree to live my seventy or rather zeventythree years over again? To which I say, yea I think with you that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been frained on a principle of benevolence, and more plsasure than pain dealt out to us. There are, indeed, (who might say nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say, how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened! My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes, indeed, sometimes fail; but not of tener than the forebodings of the gloomy. There are, I acknowledge, even in the happiest life, some terrible convulsions, heavy setoffs against the opposite page of the account. I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have an useful object. And the perfection of the moral character is, not in a stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted, and so untruly too, because impossible. but in a just equilibrium of all the passions. I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote."

"The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th, had given me ominous foreboding. Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only mediI will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposite in the same cerement our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an extatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love, and never lose again. God bless you, and support you under your heavy affliction."

*

"Putting aside these things, however, for the present, I write this letter as due to a friendship coeval with our government, and now attempted to be poisoned, when too late in life to be replaced by new affections. I had for some tine observed, in the public papers, dark hints and mysterious inuendoes of a correspondence of yours with a friend, to whom you had opened your bosom without reserve, and which was to be made public by that friend or his representative. And now it is said to be actually published. It has not yet reached us, but extracts have been given, and such as seemned most likely to draw a curtain of separation between you and myself. Were there no other motive than that of indignation against the author of this outrage on private confidence, whose shaft seems to have been aimed at yourself more particularly, this would make it the duty of every honorable mind to disappoint that aim, by oppos ing to its impression a seven-fold shield of apathy and insensibility. With me, however, no such armor is needed. The circumstances of the times in which we have happened to live, and the partiality of our friends at a particular period, placed us in a state of apparent opposition, which some might suppose to be personal also; and there might not be wanting those who wished to make it so, by tilling our ears with malignant falsehoods, by dressing up hideous phantoms of their own creation, presenting them to you under my name, to me under yours, and endeavoring to instil into our minds things concerning each other the most destitute of truth. And if there had been, at any time, a moment when we were off our guard, and in a temper to let the whispers of these people make us forget what we had known of each other for so many years, and years of so much trial, yet all men, who have attended to the workings of the human mind, who have seen the false colors under which pas

*Alluding to the Cunningham Correspondence.

sion sometimes dresses the actions and motives of others, have seen also those passions subsiding with time and reflection, dissipating like mists before the rising sun, and restoring to us the sight of all things in their true shape and colors. It would be strange, indeed, if, at our years, we were to go an age back to hunt up imaginary or forgotten facts, to disturb the repose of affections so sweetening to the evening of our lives. Be assured, my dear Sir, that I am incapable of receiving the slightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for near half a century. Beseeching you, then, not to suffer your mind to be disquieted by this wicked attempt to poison its peace, and praying you to throw it by among the things which have never happened, I add sincere assurances of my unabated and constant attachment, friendship and respect."

But the cultivation of the affections, social and domestic, and the delights of philosophical and agricultural occupation, were subjects which engaged only a subordinate share of the attention of Mr. Jefferson in retirement. One other enterprise, of public and vast utility, which it was reserved for him to accomplish, constituted the engrossing topic of his mind, from the moment of his return to private life, to the day and hour of his death. This was the establishment of the University of Virginia,-a most genial employment for his old age, and, very appropriately, the crowning act of the long and wonderful drama of his life. Having assisted in achieving for his country the inestimable blessings of civil and religious liberty, he considered the work but half complete, without securing to posterity the means of preserving that condition of moral culture, on which the perpetuation of those blessings forever depends. It was one of the first axioms to which he attained, that the liberties of a nation could never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. A system of education, therefore, which should reach every description of citizens, from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so it was the latest of public concerns in which he permitted himself to take an interest.

The opinions of Mr. Jefferson on the subject of Education were given in detail, while the Revised Code of Virginia was under consideration; of which the 'Bill for the General Diffusion of Knowl edge,' drafted by him, was a distinguishing feature. The system marked out in that Bill, proposed three distinct grades of instruction; the sum total of whose objects may be explained by adopting a sin