Monticello, November 13th, 1818.
The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding. Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable time and silence are the only medicine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant at which we are to deposit in the same cerement our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.
TH. JEFFERSON.
In the following letter we have a most interesting and minute account of Mr. Jefferson's habits and mode of life:
To Doctor Vine Utley.
Monticello, March 21st, 1819.
Sir—Your letter of February the 18th came to hand on the 1st instant; and the request of the history of my physical habits would have puzzled me not a little, had it not been for the model with which you accompanied it of Doctor Rush's answer to a similar inquiry. I live so much like other people, that I might refer to ordinary life as the history of my own. Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet. I double, however, the Doctor's glass-and-a-half of wine, and even treble it with a friend; but halve its effect by drinking the weak wines only. The ardent wines I can not drink, nor do I use ardent spirits in any form. Malt liquors and cider are my table drinks, and my breakfast, like that also of my friend, is of tea and coffee. I have been blest with organs of digestion which accept and concoct without ever murmuring whatever the palate chooses to consign to them, and I have not yet lost a tooth by age.
I was a hard student until I entered on the business of life, the duties of which leave no idle time to those disposed to fulfill them; and now, retired, at the age of seventy-six, I am again a hard student. Indeed, my fondness for reading and study revolts me from the drudgery of letter-writing; and a stiff wrist, the consequence of an early dislocation, makes writing both slow and painful. I am not so regular in my sleep as the Doctor says he was, devoting to it from five to eight hours, according as my company or the book I am reading interests me; and I never go to bed without an hour, or half-hour's reading of something moral whereon to ruminate in the intervals of sleep. But whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun. I use spectacles at night, but not necessarily in the day, unless in reading small print. My hearing is distinct in particular conversation, but confused when several voices cross each other, which unfits me for the society of the table.
I have been more fortunate than my friend in the article of health. So free from catarrhs, that I have not had one (in the breast, I mean) on an average of eight or ten years through life. I ascribe this exemption partly to the habit of bathing my feet in cold water every morning for sixty years past. A fever of more than twenty-four hours I have not had above two or three times in my life. A periodical headache has afflicted me occasionally, once, perhaps, in six or eight years, for two or three weeks at a time, which seems now to have left me; and, except on a late occasion of indisposition, I enjoy good health; too feeble, indeed, to walk much, but riding without fatigue six or eight miles a day, and sometimes thirty or forty.
I may end these egotisms, therefore, as I began, by saying that my life has been so much like that of other people, that I might say with Horace, to every one, "Nomine mutato, narratur fabula de te." I must not end, however, without due thanks for the kind sentiments of regard you are so good as to express towards myself; and with my acknowledgments for these, be pleased to accept the assurances of my respect and esteem.
TH. JEFFERSON.
In the following month of the same year we find him receiving a letter from Mrs. Cosway, who had long been silent. I give the following quotation from this letter, Jefferson's reply, and other letters from her, which close their pleasant correspondence.
From Mrs. Cosway.—[Extract.]
London, April 7th, 1819.
My different journeys to the Continent were either caused by bad health or other particular private melancholy motives; but on any sudden information of Mr. C.'s bad health, I hastened home to see him. In my stay on the Continent, I was called to form establishments of education: one at Lyons, which met with the most flattering success; and lastly, one in Italy, equally answering every hoped-for consolation. Oh! how often have I thought of America, and wished to have exerted myself there! Who would ever have imagined that I should have taken up this line! It has afforded me satisfactions unfelt before, after having been deprived of my own child. What comfortable feelings in seeing children grow up accomplished, modest, and virtuous women! They are hardly gone home from the establishment at fifteen, but are married and become patterns to their sex.
But am I not breaking the rules of modesty myself, and boasting too much? In what better manner can I relate this? However, though seemingly settled at Lodi, I was ever ready to return home when called. At last, at the first opening of communication on the cessation of the cruel hostilities which kept us all asunder, alarmed at the indifferent accounts of Mr. C.'s health, I hastened home. He is much broken, and has had two paralytic strokes, the last of which has deprived him of the use of his right hand and arm. Forgotten by the arts, suspended from the direction of education (though it is going on vastly well in my absence), I am now discharging the occupations of a nurse, happy in the self-gratification of doing my duty with no other consolation. In your "Dialogue," your Head would tell me, "That is enough;" your Heart, perhaps, will understand I might wish for more. God's will be done!
What a loss to me not having the loved Mrs. Church! and how grieved I was when told she was no more among the living! I used to see Madame de Corny in Paris. She still lives, but in bad health. She is the only one left of the common friends we knew. Strange changes, over and over again, all over Europe—you only are proceeding on well.
Now, my dear Sir, forgive this long letter. May I flatter myself to hear from you? Give me some accounts of yourself as you used to do; instead of Challion and Paris, talk to me of Monticello.
To Mrs. Cosway.
Monticello, Dec. 27th, 1820.
"Over the length of silence I draw a curtain," is an expression, my dear friend, of your cherished letter of April 7, 1819, of which, it might seem, I have need to avail myself; but not so really. To seventy-seven heavy years add two of prostrate health, during which all correspondence has been suspended of necessity, and you have the true cause of not having heard from me. My wrist, too, dislocated in Paris while I had the pleasure of being there with you, is, by the effect of years, now so stiffened that writing is become a slow and painful operation, and scarcely ever undertaken but under the goad of imperious business. But I have never lost sight of your letter, and give it now the first place among those of my trans-Atlantic friends which have been lying unacknowledged during the same period of ill health.
I rejoice, in the first place, that you are well; for your silence on that subject encourages me to presume it. And next, that you have been so usefully and pleasingly occupied in preparing the minds of others to enjoy the blessings you yourself have derived from the same source—a cultivated mind. Of Mr. Cosway I fear to say any thing, such is the disheartening account of the state of his health given in your letter; but here or wherever, I am sure he has all the happiness which an honest life assures. Nor will I say any thing of the troubles of those among whom you live. I see they are great, and wish them happily out of them, and especially that you may be safe and happy, whatever be their issue.
I will talk about Monticello, then, and my own country, as is the wish expressed in your letter. My daughter Randolph, whom you knew in Paris a young girl, is now the mother of eleven living children, the grandmother of about half a dozen others, enjoys health and good spirits, and sees the worth of her husband attested by his being at present Governor of the State in which we live. Among these I live like a patriarch of old. Our friend Trumbull is well, and is profitably and honorably employed by his country in commemorating with his pencil some of its Revolutionary honors. Of Mrs. Conger I hear nothing, nor, for a long time, of Madame de Corny. Such is the present state of our former coterie—dead, diseased, and dispersed. But "tout ce qui est differé n'est pas perdu," says the French proverb, and the religion you so sincerely profess tells us we shall meet again....
Mine is the next turn, and I shall meet it with good-will; for after one's friends are all gone before them, and our faculties leaving us, too, one by one, why wish to linger in mere vegetation, as a solitary trunk in a desolate field, from which all its former companions have disappeared. You have many good years remaining yet to be happy yourself and to make those around you happy. May these, my dear friend, be as many as yourself may wish, and all of them filled with health and happiness, will be among the last and warmest wishes of an unchangeable friend.
TH. JEFFERSON.
The original of the following letter, now lying before me, is edged with black: