We have had a remarkably cold winter.  At Hallowell, in Maine, the mercury was at thirty-four degrees below zero, of Fahrenheit, which is sixteen degrees lower than it was in Paris in 1788-9.  Here it was at six degrees above zero, which is our greatest degree of cold.

Present me respectfully to Mrs. Gallatin, and be assured of my constant and affectionate friendship.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CXLIII.—­TO JOHN ADAMS, May 17, 1818

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, May 17, 1818.

Dear Sir,

I was so unfortunate as not to receive from Mr. Holly’s own hand your favor of January the 28th, being then at my other home.  He dined only with my family, and left them with an impression which has filled me with regret that I did not partake of the pleasure his visit gave them.  I am glad he is gone to Kentucky.  Rational Christianity will thrive more rapidly there than here.  They are freer from prejudices than we are, and bolder in grasping at truth.  The time is not distant, though neither you nor I shall see it, when we shall be but a secondary people to them.  Our greediness for wealth, and fantastical expense have degraded, and will degrade, the minds of our maritime citizens.  These are the peculiar vices of commerce.

I had been long without hearing from you, but I had heard of you through a letter from Doctor Waterhouse.  He wrote to reclaim against an expression of Mr. Wirt’s, as to the commencement of motion in the revolutionary ball.  The lawyers say that words are always to be expounded secundum subjectam materiem, which, in Mr. Wirt’s case, was Virginia.  It would, moreover, be as difficult to say at what moment the Revolution began, and what incident set it in motion, as to fix the moment that the embryo becomes an animal, or the act which gives him a beginning.  But the most agreeable part of his letter was that which informed me of your health, your activity, and strength of memory; and the most wonderful, that which assured me that you retained your industry and promptness in epistolary correspondence.  Here you have entire advantage over me.  My repugnance to the writing-table becomes daily and hourly more deadly and 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 through the dreary wilderness of time before me, whose bourne I see not.  Losing daily all interest in the things around us, something else is necessary to fill the void.  With me it is reading, which occupies the mind without the labor of producing ideas from my own stock.