When you study the picture at the right, which I confess affects me as strongly as other daguerreotypes did the future Mrs. Robert Browning, you will find yourself meeting the steady gaze of a man born in 1767. He is, of course, John Quincy Adams, and when the picture was taken, in 1843, he was a congressman from Massachusetts, actively engaged in that long battle over slavery which ended in the Civil War. It was fourteen years since he had left the White House, but he had lived long enough to become the earliest of our Presidents to be photographed; he would have a fatal stroke in 1848 on the floor of the House of Representatives. Look into those intense eyes again and think what they had seen: the courts of Europe as a diplomat; the early White House in his father’s day; the corridors of power as a senator and a Secretary of State. They had beheld Washington and other Old Romans of the early Republic; they had awed young college boys when he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, stared down haughty British representatives during the peace negotiations after the War of 1812, faced off with angry Southerners in the House.

The more you know, the more you see in an old picture. And the picture itself will help you. The books behind him are appropriate props for a man who knew Greek, Latin, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German, who read most mornings from six to nine and wrote hortatory poems in the evenings. That Adams has shriveled a bit with age is sadly evident in the coat now too large and the wrinkled sleeve too long. About the handkerchief on his knee I can only speculate, but it is not obligatory or even necessary to identify everything you see when throwing open a window on another time.

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