He was ashamed to be amused; his mind no
longer answered to the stimulus of variety; he could not face a
new thought. All his immense strength his intense nervous energy,
his keen analytic perceptions, were oriented in one direction,
and he could not change it. Congress was full of such men; in the
Senate, Sumner was almost the only exception; in the Executive,
Grant and Boutwell were varieties of the type -- political
specimens -- pathetic in their helplessness to do anything with
power when it came to them. They knew not how to amuse
themselves; they could not conceive how other people were amused.
Work, whiskey, and cards were life. The atmosphere of political
Washington was theirs -- or was supposed by the outside world to
be in their control -- and this was the reason why the outside
world judged that Washington was fatal even for a young man of
thirty-two, who had passed through the whole variety of
temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a dozen years; who
never played cards, and who loathed whiskey.
CHAPTER XX
FAILURE (1871)
FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, Henry Adams
could recall his first visit to Harvard College. He must have
been nine years old when on one of the singularly gloomy winter
afternoons which beguiled Cambridgeport, his mother drove him out
to visit his aunt, Mrs.
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