From that scene, so impressive in itself, and impressive because it never before happened, and can never happen again, we have come up to this place surrounded with the decent drapery of public mourning, on a day set apart by authority, to recite the history of the citizen, who, in the ripeness of age, and fulness of honors, has thus descended to his rest.  It is fit to do so, because it is by such exercises that nations regenerate their early virtues and renew their constitutions.  All nations must perpetually renovate their virtues and their constitutions, or perish.  Never was there more need to renovate ours than now, when we seem to be passing from the safe old policy of peace and moderation into a career of conquest and martial renown.  Never was the duty of preserving our free institutions in all their purity, more obvious than it is now, when they have become beacons to mankind in what seems to be a general dissolution of their ancient social systems.

The history of John Quincy Adams is one that opens no new truth in the philosophy of virtue; for there is no undiscovered truth in that philosophy.  But it is a history that sheds marvellous confirmation on maxims which all mankind know, and yet are prone to undervalue and forget.  The exalted character before us was formed by the combination of virtue, courage, assiduity, and modesty, under favorable conditions, with native talent and genius, and illustrates the truth, that in morals as in nature, simplicity is the chief element of the sublime.

John Quincy Adams was fortunate in his lineage; in the period, and in the place of his nativity; in all the circumstances of education; in the age and country in which he lived; in the incidents, as well as the occasions of his public service; and in the period and manner of his death.  He was a descendant from one of the Puritan planters of Massachusetts, and a son of the most intrepid actor in the Revolution of Independence.  Quincy, the place of his birth, is a plain, bounded on the west by towering granite hills, and swept without defence by every wind from the ocean.  Its soil in ancient times was as sterile as its climate is always rigorous.

Born on the eleventh day of July, 1767, in the hour of the agitation of rebellion, and reared within sight and sound of gathering war, the earliest political ideas he received were such as John Adams then uttered—­“We must fight.”  “Sink or swim—­live or die—­survive or perish with my country, is my unalterable determination.”  A mother fervently pious, and eminent in intellectual gifts, directed with more than maternal assiduity and solicitude the education of him who was to render her own name immortal.  Never quite divorced from home, yet twice, and for long periods in his youth, a visitor in Europe, he enjoyed always the parental discipline of one of the founders of the American State, and often the daily conversation of Franklin and Jefferson; and combined travel in France, Spain, England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia, and even diplomatic experience, with the instructions of the schools of Paris, of the University at Leyden, and of Harvard University at Cambridge; and all these influences fell upon him at a period when his country, then opening the way to human liberty through trials of fire, fixed the attention of mankind.