John Quincy Adams, Letter to Charles Francis Adams (February 21, 1830):
“Every one of the letters of Cicero is a picture of the state of the writer’s mind when it was written. It is like an invocation of shades to read them. I see him approach me like the image of a phantasmagoria. He seems opening his lips to speak to me and passes off, but his words as if they had fallen upon my ears are left deeply stamped upon the memory. I watch with his sleepless nights. I share his solitary sighs. I feel the agitation of his pulse, not for himself but for his son…for his country. There is sometimes so much in it of painful reality that I close the book. No tragedy was ever half so pathetic. My morning always ends with a hearty execration of Caesar, and with what is perhaps not so right, a sensation of relief at the 23 stabs of the Ides of March… Everything else in the story is afflicting and gloomy.” [Quoted in Fred Kaplan’s John Quincy Adams: American Visionary.]
