I hope the necessity will at length be seen of establishing institutions, here as in Europe, where every branch of science, useful at this day, may be taught in it’s highest degrees.

but I am far from presuming to direct the reading of my fellow citizens, who are good enough judges themselves of what is worthy their reading.

my business is to beguile the wearisomness of declining life, as I endeavor to do, by the delights of classical reading and of Mathematical truths, and by the consolations of a sound philosophy, equally indifferent to hope & fear.

I read no newspaper now but Ritchie’s, and in that chiefly the advertisements, for they contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. I feel a much greater interest in knowing what passed two or three thousand years ago, than in what is now passing. I read nothing therefore but of the...

my repugnance to the writing table becomes daily & hourly more deadly & insurmountable. in place of this has come on a canine appetite for reading. and I indulge it: because I see in it a relief against the taedium senectutis; a lamp to lighten my path thro’ the dreary wilderness of time...

but the general fact is I have observed, that at whatever age, or in whatever form, we have known a person of old so we believe them him to continue for ever after indefinitely, unchanged by time or waste decay.

nothing is more incumbent on the old than to know when they should get out of the way, and relinquish to younger successors the honors they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform.

but our machines have now been running for 70. or 80. 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 awhile, all will at length surcease motion.

I am now at that period of life when tranquility, and a retirement from the passions which disturb it, constitute the summum bonum.

Congress has just risen, having done nothing remarkable, except passing a tariff bill, by squeezing majorities, very revolting to a great portion of the people of the states, among whom, it is believed, it would not have recieved a vote but of the manufactories manufactorers themselves. it is...