endowments and moral
qualities, and whose recollection can never recur without a deep-drawn
sigh from the bosom of any one who knew him. You mention that I showed
you an inscription I had proposed for the tomb-stone of your father. Did
I leave it in your hands to be copied? I ask the question, not that I
have any such recollection, but that I find it no longer in the place of
its deposite, and think I never took it out but on that occasion. Ever
and affectionately yours.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CXXX.--TO JOHN ADAMS, April 8, 1816

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, April 8, 1816.

Dear Sir,

I have to acknowledge your two favors of February the 16th and March the
2nd, and to join sincerely in the sentiment of Mrs. Adams, and regret
that distance separates us so widely. An hour of conversation would be
worth a volume of letters. But we must take things as they come.

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. I have often wondered for
what good end the sensations of grief could be intended. All our
other passions, within proper bounds, have an useful object. And the
perfection of the moral character is, not in a stoical apathy, so
hypocritically vaunted, and so untruly too, because impossible, but in a
just equilibrium of all the passions. I wish the pathologists then would
tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is
the cause, proximate or remote.

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