Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 8
1838-11-26
Cold and clear. Office. Afternoon my father off. Evening quiet at home.
My time today was taken up scarcely with my knowing how. Engaged in Accounts at the Office until noon when I went home and made the arrangements for my father’s going off. After an early dinner I accompanied him with my two boys John and Charles to the Railway depot. it was piercing cold but the Cars were close and comfortable.
My father has been with me two days over a fortnight during which time I have enjoyed his society as I always do.1 Indeed I shall miss him very much as now I have not one single friend of any intimacy in the City. Davis appears to be in irrevocable eclipse, Walsh has vanished and I never had any others. Well, I must seek in the amusement of literary occupation for the substitutes, and in the growth of my family affections.2
Read Burr, and after an unsuccessful attempt at a visit, made another effort at a concluding paper.
“I have been living more than a fortnight in indolent enjoyment at my Son’s house, without being troubled with the distracting cares of a family, without being dunned, and without disturbance of any kind. From this delightful dream ... I was this day compelled to awake”
(JQA, Diary, 26 Nov.).
Writing to his mother some weeks later, CFA returned to reflection on his situation with a conclusion recollecting Paradise Lost, XII, 646: “The few persons who formerly visited me socially and in a quiet way have taken other courses so that I am driven to form a taste for crowds. T. K. Davis has cut ‘the fus colored circles’ as too aristocratic, and me as being a consolidationist in politics, so that I see nothing of him. Walsh has evaporated for all that I know to the contrary, and [Edmund] Quincy has banished the intemperance of conviviality for the intemperance of Abolitionism. A. H. Everett is vegetating in Roxbury or elsewhere and never comes near me. So that the world is all before me where to choose just as if I was beginning it anew” (6 Feb. 1839, Adams Papers).