tact with Mill, Comte, Darwin, Spencer, all the Adamses of the fourth generation had been emancipated from their attenuated hereditary belief in a beneficent overruling Providence. But Charles Francis II and Brooks recommitted themselves without reservation to the overweening posivitism of mid-century "scientific" philosophy. Henry alone refuses to surrender. A wily, experienced wrestler, returning again and again to grapple with the Time-Spirit, at the end of each bout he eludes the adversary; and at the moment one expects to see him thrown, suddenly he has vanished, he has fled through centuries falling about him like autumn leaves, and from somewhere in the Middle Ages, near some old shrine of the Virgin, one hears the sound of mocking laughter. It is the free spirit, eternally seeking.
Henry was, I think, a great man and the only great Adams of his generation. All the other Adamses had been men of action tinctured with letters. Henry alone definitely renounced action and turned the full current of the ancestral energy to letters. By so doing he established a new standard of achievement for the Adams line; and in consequence, of course, for the rest of us. Up to the time of the Civil War there had been for them but one field of glory, the political arena, and but one standard of achievement, national administration. After the war Charles Francis II tried to be great in "big business," but in the Adams sense
