John Quincy Adams Digital Diary

25. V:30. Monday.

The ground was covered with Snow this Morning before day light; but it turn’d to rain, and was soon swept away. The Newspapers announced the decease of two persons with whom I 189have been at different periods of my life in relations of some intimacy. One was John Callender, a Classmate at Cambridge of my late brother Thomas, and with whom I was afterwards on terms of much familiarity in Boston— But for the last thirty years I have scarcely seen him— He has been great part of that time Clerk of the Supreme Court of the State of Massachusetts, and died very suddenly one night last week, of Apoplexy— The other is Mary E. Roberdeau, who died last Thursday,—about 30—an amiable, intelligent and accomplished young woman, cut off in the prime of life, and who seemed destined to a happier fate— It is a melancholy privilege of Old age, to survive the generation of cotemporaries— Those with whom we have lived, and whom we have loved drop around us one after another— Till, dying, all we can resign is breath— At every death of a friend or acquaintance these reflections return, and yet when death comes it finds us as unprepared as if we had never received a warning— I walked to the Capitol, and returning at Gadsby’s the visits of Mr Huntington and of C. Hughes with Sir Valentine Duke, I met Mr Ellsworth, of Connecticut and afterwards Mr Grennell of Massachusetts.— At the Capitol I gave to Mr Clarke, the Clerk of the House, several Newspapers and a Letter, addressed to John Adams, a new member of the House from New-York, and which have been sent to me from the Post-Office by mistake. Mr Clarke said this Mr John Adams had been at the house this Morning. I went into the Library and enquired for Bacon’s Novum Organon in English, and for La Fontaine’s Fables— Neither of which was there— Towards Evening the sky cleared away— My Son John had a severe return of his chill and fever this day— I met and spoke to Coll. Roger Jones and to Mr M’Cormick the Clerk in the Department of State— In the Evening I wrote a Report of the visiting Committee of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, upon their inspection of the Libraries and Cabinets on the 12th. of July last, and enclosed it, with the Reports of the Librarians and Professors, to Governor Lincoln, with a request that he would cause it to be delivered to the Board of Overseers at their next Meeting— There has been none since the 12th. of July.