the salt-marshes, or took to the pine-woods and the granite
quarries, or chased muskrats and hunted snapping-turtles in the
swamps, or mushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills, summer and
country were always sensual living, while winter was always
compulsory learning. Summer was the multiplicity of nature;
winter was school.

The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams
was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran
though life, and made the division between its perplexing,
warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites, with
growing emphasis to the last year of study. From earliest
childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was
double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty,
were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his
eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to
little boys. Though Quincy was but two hours' walk from Beacon
Hill, it belonged in a different world. For two hundred years,
every Adams, from father to son, had lived within sight of State
Street, and sometimes had lived in it, yet none had ever taken
kindly to the town, or been taken kindly by it. The boy inherited
his double nature. He knew as yet nothing about his
great-grandfather, who had died a dozen years before his own
birth: he took for granted that any great-grandfather of his must
have always been good, and his enemies wicked; but he divined his
great-grandfather's character from his own. Never for a moment
did he connect the two ideas of Boston and John Adams; they were
separate and antagonistic; the idea of John Adams went with
Quincy. He knew his grandfather John Quincy Adams only as an old
man of seventy-five or eighty who was friendly and gentle with