To charm our weary hours,
      To rouse our stagnant hearts,
    And leave the sense of new-born powers,
      Which never more departs.

      We thank him in the name
      Of One who sits on high,
    And aye abides in every fame
      Which makes a brighter sky.

* * * * *

IV.

ABIGAIL ADAMS

(BORN 1744—­DIED 1818.)

THE WIFE OF OUR SECOND PRESIDENT—­THE MOTHER OF OUR SIXTH.

Abigail Smith, the daughter of a Congregational minister, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, was one of the most noted women of our early history.  She left a record of her heart and character, and to some extent a picture of the stirring times in which she lived, in the shape of letters which are of perennial value, especially to the young.  “It was fashionable to ridicule female learning” in her day; and she says of herself in one of her letters, “I was never sent to any school.”  She adds in explanation, “I was always sick.”  When girls, however, were sent to school, their education seldom went beyond writing and arithmetic.  But in spite of disadvantages, she read and studied in private, and by means of correspondence with relatives and others, cultivated her mind, and formed an easy and graceful style of writing.

On the 25th of October, 1764, Miss Smith became the wife of John Adams, a lawyer of Braintree, the part of the town in which he lived being afterwards called Quincy, in honor of Mrs. Adams’s maternal grandfather.  Charles Francis Adams, her grandson, from whose memoir of her the material for this brief sketch is drawn, says that the ten years immediately following her marriage present little that is worth recording.

But when the days of the Revolution came on, those times that tried men’s souls, women were by no means exempt from tribulation, and they, too, began to make history.  The strength of Mrs. Adams’s affection for her husband may be learned from an extract from one of her letters:  “I very well remember when Eastern circuits of the courts, which lasted a month, were thought an age, and an absence of three months intolerable; but we are carried from step to step, and from one degree to another, to endure that which we at first think impossible.”

In 1778 her husband went as one of the commissioners to France.  During his absence Mrs. Adams managed, as she had often done before, both the household and the farm—­a true wife and mother of the Revolution.  “She was a farmer cultivating the land, and discussing the weather and the crops; a merchant reporting prices current and the rates of exchange, and directing the making up of invoices; a politician speculating upon the probabilities of peace and war; and a mother writing the most exalted sentiments to her son.”

John Quincy Adams, the son, in his twelfth year, was with his father in Europe.  The following extracts are from letters to him, dated 1778-80: