Monticello, Dec. 26th, 1814.

My good Friend—The mail between us passes very slowly. Your letter of November 17 reached this place on the 14th inst. only. I think while you were writing it the candle must have burnt blue, and that a priest or some other conjurer should have been called in to exorcise your room. To be serious, however, your view of things is more gloomy than necessary. True, we are at war—that that war was unsuccessful by land the first year, but honorable the same year by sea, and equally by sea and land ever since. Our resources, both of men and money, are abundant, if wisely called forth and administered. I acknowledge that experience does not as yet seem to have led our Legislatures into the best course of either....

I think, however, there will be peace. The negotiators at Ghent are agreed in every thing except as to a rag of Maine, which we can not yield nor they seriously care about, but it serves them to hold by until they can hear what the Convention of Hartford will do. When they shall see, as they will see, that nothing is done there, they will let go their hold, and we shall have peace on the status ante bellum. You have seen that Vermont and New Hampshire refuse to join the mutineers, and Connecticut does it with a "saving of her duty to the Federal Constitution." Do you believe that Massachusetts, on the good faith and aid of little Rhode Island, will undertake a war against the rest of the Union and the half of herself? Certainly never—so much for politics.

We are all well, little and big, young and old. Mr. and Mrs. Divers enjoy very so-so health, but keep about. Mr. Randolph had the command of a select corps during summer; but that has been discharged some time. We are feeding our horses with our wheat, and looking at the taxes coming on us as an approaching wave in a storm; still I think we shall live as long, eat as much, and drink as much, as if the wave had already glided under our ship. Somehow or other these things find their way out as they come in, and so I suppose they will now. God bless you, and give you health, happiness, and hope, the real comforters of this nether world.

TH. JEFFERSON.

In a letter to Cæsar A. Rodney, inviting a visit from him, and written on March 16th, 1815, he says: "You will find me in habitual good health, great contentedness, enfeebled in body, impaired in memory, but without decay in my friendships."

In a letter written to Jean Baptiste Say a few days earlier than the one just quoted, he speaks thus of the society of the country around him: "The society is much better than is common in country situations; perhaps there is not a better country society in the United States. But do not imagine this a Parisian or an academical society. It consists of plain, honest, and rational neighbors, some of them well-informed, and men of reading, all superintending their farms, hospitable and friendly, and speaking nothing but English. The manners of every nation are the standard of orthodoxy within itself. But these standards being arbitrary, reasonable people in all allow free toleration for the manners, as for the religion, of others."

We get a glimpse of the state of his health and his daily habits in a letter written to a friend in the spring of 1816. He writes:

I retain good health, and am rather feeble to walk much, but ride with ease, passing two or three hours a day on horseback,[59] and every three or four months taking, in a carriage, a journey of ninety miles to a distant possession, where I pass a good deal of my time. My eyes need the aid of glasses by night, and, with small print, in the day also. My hearing is not quite so sensible as it used to be; no tooth shaking yet, but shivering and shrinking in body from the cold are now experienced, my thermometer having been as low as 12° this morning.

My greatest oppression is a correspondence afflictingly laborious, the extent of which I have long been endeavoring to curtail. This keeps me at the drudgery of the writing-table all the prime hours of the day, leaving for the gratification of my appetite for reading only what I can steal from the hours of sleep. Could I reduce this epistolary corvée within the limits of my friends and affairs, and give the time redeemed from it to reading and reflection, to history, ethics, mathematics, my life would be as happy as the infirmities of age would admit, and I should look on its consummation with the composure of one "qui summum nec metuit diem nec optat."

The cheerfulness of his bright and happy temper gleams out in the following extract from a letter written a few months later to John Adams:

To John Adams.

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....

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 Catherine's private correspondent and factor in all things not diplomatic. It was through him I got her permission for poor Ledyard to go to Kamtschatka, 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 Kamtschatka, had him seized, brought back, and set down in Poland.

To Mrs. Trist.