Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CXXX.—­TO JOHN ADAMS, April 8, 1816

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, April 8, 1816.

Dear Sir,

I have to acknowledge your two favors of February the 16th and March the 2nd, and to join sincerely in the sentiment of Mrs. Adams, and regret that distance separates us so widely.  An hour of conversation would be worth a volume of letters.  But we must take things as they come.

You ask, if I would agree to live my seventy or rather seventy-three years over again?  To which I say, yea.  I think with you that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us.  There are, indeed, (who might say nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen.  To these I say, how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!  My temperament is sanguine.  I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern.  My hopes, indeed, sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.  There are, I acknowledge, even in the happiest life, some terrible convulsions, heavy set-offs against the opposite page of the account.  I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of grief could be intended.  All our other passions, within proper bounds, have an useful object.  And the perfection of the moral character is, not in a stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted, and so untruly too, because impossible, but in a just equilibrium of all the passions.  I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote.

Did I know Baron Grimm while at Paris?  Yes, most intimately.  He was the pleasantest and most conversable member of the diplomatic corps while I was there; a man of good fancy, acuteness, irony, cunning, and egoism.  No heart, not much of any science, yet enough of every one to speak its language:  his forte was Belles-lettres, painting, and sculpture.  In these he was the oracle of the society, and as such, was the Empress Catharine’s private correspondent and factor, in all things not diplomatic.  It was through him I got her permission for poor Ledyard to go to Kamschatka, and cross over thence to the western coast of America, in order to penetrate across our continent in the opposite direction to that afterwards adopted for Lewis and Clarke:  which permission she withdrew after he had got within two hundred miles of Kamschatka, had him seized, brought back, and set down in Poland.  Although I never heard Grimm express the opinion directly, yet I always supposed him to be of the school of Diderot, D’Alembert, D’Holbach; the first of whom committed his system of atheism to writing in ‘Le Bon Sens,’