I walked in the burying-yard and viewed, the Granite tombstones, erected over the graves of my ancestors, by my father — Henry Adams, the first of the family who came from England — Joseph Adams Senior, and Abigail Baxter his wife. Joseph Adams junior and Hannah Bass, his second wife — John Adams, senior my father’s father, and Susanna Boylston his wife — Four Generations; of whom very little more is known than is recorded upon these Stones. There are three succeeding Generations of us, now living. — Pass another century, and we shall all be mouldering in the same dust, or resolved into the same elements — Who then of our posterity shall visit this yard? — And what shall he read engraved upon the Stones? — This is known only to the Creator of all — The record may be longer — May it be of as blameless lives.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Sunday, October 22, 2023
A Walk in a Graveyard
John Quincy Adams, Diary (September 20, 1824):