receiving the visits of the citizens of the adjoining towns. At 11 o'clock the Auburn Guards escorted Mr. Adams and the committee, followed by a large procession, to the car-house. Accompanied by Gov. Seward, Judge Miller, Hon. Christopher Morgan, the committee, Auburn Guards, and a number of the citizens of Auburn, he was conveyed in an extra train of cars, in an hour and five minutes, to Syracuse. At Syracuse, at Utica, at Albany, the same spontaneous outgushing manifestations of respect and affection met him that had hitherto attended his journey in every populous place through which he passed. In his reply to the address of Mr. Barnard, at Albany, he concluded in the following words :— 66 Lingering as I am on the stage of public life, and, as many of you may think, lingering beyond the period when nature calls for repose--while I remain in the station which I now occupy in the Congress of the United States, if you, my hearers, as an assembly, or if any one among you, as an individual, have any object or purpose to promote, or any end to secure that he believes can in any way advance his interests or increase his happiness, then, in the name of God, I ask you to send your petitions to me! (Tremendous cheering.) I hope this is not trespassing too far on politics. (Laughter, and cheers.) I unhesitatingly promise you, one and all, that if I can in any way serve you in that station, I will do it most cheerfully; regarding it as the choicest blessing of God, if I shall thus be enabled to make some just return for the kind attentions which you have this day bestowed upon me." In his route homeward, Mr. Adams was received and entertained in a very handsome manner by the people of Pittsfield, Mass. He was addressed by Hon 66 George N. Briggs, who alluded, in eloquent terms, to his long and distinguished public services. Mr. Adams, in reply, spoke of the scenes amidst which he had passed his early youth, and of the influence which they exerted in forming his character and shaping his purposes. In 1775," said he, "the minute men from a hundred towns in the province were marching, at a moment's warning, to the scene of opening war. Many of them called at my father's house in Quincy, and received the hospitality of John Adams. All were lodged in the house which the house would contain; others in the barns, and wherever they could find a place. There were then in my father's kitchen some dozen or two of pewter spoons; and I well recollect going into the kitchen and seeing some of the men engaged in running those spoons into bullets for the use of the troops! Do you wonder," said he, "that a boy of seven years of age, who witnessed this scene, should be a patriot ?" In the fall of the same year, Mr. Adams received an invitation from the Cincinnati Astronomical Society, to visit that city, and assist in the ceremony of laying the corner stone of an observatory, to be erected on an eminence called Mount Ida. The invitation was accepted. On his journey to Cincinnati, the same demonstrations of respect, the same eagerness to honor the aged patriarch were manifested in the various cities and towns through which he passed, as on his summer tour. The ceremony of laying the corner stone took place on the 9th of November, 1843. Mr. Adams delivered an address on the occasion, replete with eloquence, wisdom, philosophy, and religion. The following beautiful extract will afford a specimen : "The various difficult, and, in many respects, opposite motives which have impelled mankind to the study of the stars, have had a singular effect in complicating and confounding the recommendation of the science. Religion, idolatry, superstition, curiosity, the thirst for knowledge, the passion for penetrating the secrets of nature, the warfare of the huntsman by night and by day against the beast of the forest and of the field, the meditations of the shepherd in the custody and wanderings of his flocks, the influence of the revolving seasons of the year, and the successive garniture of the firmament upon the labors of the husbandman, upon the seed time and the harvest, the blooming of flowers, the ripening of the vintage, the polar pilot of the navigator, and the mysterious magnet of the mariner—all, in harmonious action, stimulate the child of earth and of heaven to interrogate the dazzling splendors of the sky, to reveal to him the laws of their own existence. "He has his own comforts, his own happiness, his own existence, identified with theirs. He sees the Creator in creation, and calls upon creation to declare the glory of the Creator. When Pythagoras, the philosopher of the Grecian schools, conceived that more than earthly idea of 'the music of the spheres'-when the great dramatist of nature could inspire the lips of his lover on the moonlight green with the beloved of his soul, to say to her :— 'Sit, Jessica.-Look how the floor of Heaven Is thick inlaid with pattens of bright gold! There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest, Still choiring to the young eyed cherubim!' 66 Oh, who is the one with a heart, but almost wishes to cast off this muddy vesture of decay, to be admitted to the joy of listening to the celestial harmony!” CHAPTER XV. MR. ADAMS' LAST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC AT BOSTON-HIS HEALTH-LECTURES THE last time Mr. Adams appeared in public in Boston, he presided at a meeting of the citizens of that city, in Faneuil Hall. “A man had been kidnapped in Boston-kidnapped at noon-day, on the high road between Faneuil Hall and old Quincy,' and carried off to be a slave! New England hands had seized their brother, sold him into bondage forever, and his children after him. A meeting was called to talk the matter over, in a plain way, and look in one another's faces. Who was fit to preside in such a case? That old man sat in the chair in Faneuil Hall. Above him was the image of his father and his own; around him were Hancock and the other Adams, and Washington, greatest of all. Before him were the men and women of Boston, met to consider the wrongs done to a miserable negro slave. The roof of the old Cradle of Liberty spanned over them all. Forty years before, a young man and a Senator, he had taken the chair at a meeting called to consult on the wrong done to American seamen, violently impressed by the British from an American ship of war-the unlucky Chesapeake. Now an old man, clothed with half a century of honors, he sits in the same Hall, to preside over a meeting to consider the outrage done to a single slave. One was the first meeting of citizens he ever presided over; the other was 'he last: both for the same object-the defence of the eternal right !"* Few men retain the health and vigor with which Mr. Adams was blessed in extreme old age. When most others are decrepit and helpless, he was in the enjoyment of meridian strength and energy, both of body and m'nd, and could endure labors which would prostrate many in the prime of manhood. An instance. of his powers of endurance is furnished in his journey to Washing on, to attend the opening of Congress, when in the 74th year of his age. On Monday morning he left Boston, and the same evening delivered a lecture before the Young Men's Institute, in Hartford, Conn. The next day he proceeded to New Haven, and in the evening lectured before a similar Institute in that city. Wednesday he pursued his journey to New York, and in the evening lectured before the New York Lyceum, in the Broadway Tabernacle. Thursday evening he *Theodore Parker. |