Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 8
1839-08-14
Cold and foggy. At home, dine and evening at my father’s.
I passed some time in the morning in continuation of the work of copying a long letter. I have now seriously commenced the duty of 279preparing the work which I have been meditating during the Summer, and shall continue it easily as I find it convenient. It will afford me a kind of agreeable occupation for some time to come, and in the mean time I will try to arrange in my mind the elements of a biographical summary.1
The materials for the Lecture worry me much more and I must be collecting them.2 Yet on the whole I like the kind of life I now lead exceedingly, for it seems to furnish me with a hope of earning an honest reputation without putting me into the region of violent passions and overstrained wishes and fears. The life of the politician in this country most particularly is a life of terror and of personal sacrifices which are hardly compensated even by the most brilliant momentary triumphs. And every day the thing grows worse instead of better.
Read an hour in Menzel who thinks justly, and moderately. At my father’s there dined with us Mr. and Mrs. Lunt, who also remained until after tea. I therefore did nothing during the afternoon but put in three buds into apple trees.
JQA had suggested to CFA the preparation and publication of a memoir of AA (see the entry for 13 June, above). CFA, stimulated by the idea and by the warmth with which her letters had been received when included in his Massachusetts Historical Society lecture (entry for 23 Jan. 1838, above), thereafter must have thought of combining the memoir with a collection of the letters. Reading the letter lent him two days before by Mrs. Greenleaf seems to have convinced him to proceed.
Doubts about accepting the invitation to address the Mercantile Library Association in New York (entry for 8 Aug., above) seem also to have been resolved.