Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Eulogy on the Honorable, John Quincy Adams: Delivered March 24, 1848, at the Request of the Students of Dartmouth College
It is easy to enact a local pageant for political effect; to exalt a military chieftain, or a public orator. A crowd can be assembled for any purpose; to observe the tricks of a mountebank, or the execution of a criminal. Any thing that speaks sharply to the senses of men will move the masses as by an electric impulse, and sway them to the will of the practised operator. But when a great nation stops suddenly in its wild career, and bows itself before the God of nations; when it confesses to him, as if struck by the remembrance of his majesty, and its own unworthiness, the cause of that effect is not magnetic, but moral. Something has touched not the nerves, but the heart.
The recent death of Mr. Adams awakened that moral sympathy. The emotion was profound and universal. But it was peculiar. It was not as when Washington died. Some can recollect that then the great heart suffered a momentary paralysis. Consternation fell upon us. But in the speedy reaction there was a universal gush of sorrow. The nation was dissolved and found its relief in floods of tears. The old men and children, the young men and maidens wept together. We buried him as a father, a deliverer, and turned away from his grave in an agony of mourning. The men and women of that age, who survive, weep still at the name of Washington. It was not because he was not great; nor because the idea of his greatness was not, of itself, sufficient to have repressed that kind of sensibility.
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