Page:The Ladies of the White House.djvu/129

Rh In the midst of public or private troubles, the buoyant spirit of Mrs. Adams never forsook her. "I am a mortal enemy," she wrote upon one occasion to her husband, "to anything but a cheerful countenance and a merry heart, which Solomon tells us does good like a medicine." "This spirit," says her son, " contributed greatly to lift up his heart, when surrounded by difficulties and dangers, exposed to open hostility, and secret detraction, and resisting a torrent of invective, such as it may well be doubted whether any, other individual in public station in the United States has ever tried to stem. It was this spirit which soothed his wounded feelings when the country, which he had served in the full consciousness of the perfect honesty of his motives, threw him off, and signified its preference for other statesmen. There are oftener, even in this life, more compensations for the severest of the troubles that afflict mankind, than we are apt to think."

The sacrifices made by Mrs. Adams during the long era of war, pestilence, and famine, deserves and should receive from a nation's gratitude a monument as high and massive as her illustrious husband's.

Let it be reared in the hearts of the women of America, who may proudly claim her as a model, and let her fame be transmitted to remotest posterity—the "Portia" of the rebellious provinces.

Statues and monuments belong rather to a bygone than a present time, and are indicative of a less degree of culture than we of this century boast. The pages