Chamber.

***

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives:

Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled
me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was
transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the
present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country,
whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a
retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in
my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of
my declining years--a retreat which was rendered every day more
necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to
inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the
gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the
magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my
country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and
most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his
qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who
(inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the
duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious
of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare
aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from
a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be
affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I
have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former
instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent
proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too