John Quincy Adams turns off from Byron and Shelley and Wieland and Goethe, and returns to Pope,
"Who pleased his childhood and informed his youth."
The pleasure of hope is smaller; that of memory greater. It is exceeding beautiful that it is so. The venerable man loves to set recollection to beat the roll-call, and summon up from the grave the old time, "the good old time, the old places, old friends, old games, old talk; nay, to his ear the old familiar tunes are sweeter than anything that Mendelssohn, or Strauss, or Rossini can bring to pass. Elder Brewster expects to hear St Martin's and Old Hundred chanted in heaven. Why not? To him heaven comes in the long-used musical tradition, not in the neologies of sweet sound.
He loves the old doctrines. The Christian of the fourth century, who in manhood went through fire for Christianity's sake, and confessed Jesus in the jail and on the rack, in his old age goes back to the castle of Dame Venus, whom in his heady youth he had forsworn. He loves the temples and statues of his father's religion, and rebuilds the faith which once he destroyed. The Protestant who stood by Luther's doctrine in all his manly days, now that he is old thinks of the Madonna of his childhood, and dies with the once hated wafer in his lips. The Unitarian woman at her Thursday lecture, who in her prime, with Ware and Channing, endured the reproach of thinking for herself, and bore the common Church's scoff and scorn, now fans her faded cheek with denunciations of all who doubt a miracle; deals "damnation round the land;" getting old and cold-blooded, she goes back to Orthodoxy, and wants a chance to warm her shrivelled limbs and poor thin blood at the fire of eternal torment. An old Poem of the North tells of a brave boy, who in his earlier days found his mother's cottage too narrow, mourned at tending the goats on the mountain-side, and felt his heart swell in him like a brook from the melting of the snow, when he saw a ship shoot like an arrow into the bay. He ran from his mother and the goats. The Viking took him on board. The wind swelled the sails. He saw the hill-top sink in the blue deep, and was riotously glad.
