Ware, Henry Waterston, R. C. Weir, R. S. Weiss, John Wendte, Chas. W. Westwood, Horace Wile, Frances W. Wiley, Hiram O. Willard, Samuel Williams, Theodore C. Williams, Velma C. Willis, Love Maria Willis, Nathaniel P. Wilson, Edwin H. Wilson, Lewis G. Young, George H. Biographical Sketches with Notes on Hymns Adams, Hon. John Quincy, Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, July 11, 1767—February 21, 1848, Washington, D. C. He graduated from Harvard in 1787. From 1794-1801 he was United States Minister to England, the Netherlands and Prussia. In 1806 he was appointed Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard. In 1809 he became United States Minister to Russia, in 1817 he was Secretary of State, and from 1824 to 1828 he was President of the United States. In 1831 he was elected to the House of Representatives, in which body he served until his death. Most of his verse, both religious and secular, was written after he had left the Presidency, but he remains the only hymn writer who has ever been President of this country. In his later years he composed a metrical version of the Psalms, best described as a free rendering in fairly good verse of what he felt was the essential idea of each Psalm. When his minister, Rev. William P. Lunt, _q.v._, of the First Parish, (Unitarian) Quincy, Massachusetts, undertook the preparation of his hymn book _The Christian Psalmist_, (1841), Mrs. Adams put the manuscript of her husband’s metrical Psalms into Mr. Lunt’s hands, and the latter included 17 of them in his book, and five other hymns by his distinguished parishioner. The effect on Adams is recorded in a moving entry in his _Journal_ which reveals an aspect of his character quite unknown to those who regarded him as an opinionated and uncompromising though sincere and upright politician. He wrote on June 29, 1845, “Mr. Lunt preached this morning, Eccles. III, 1. For everything there is a season. He had given out as the first hymn to be sung the 138^th of the Christian Psalter, his compilation and the hymn-book now used in our church. It was my version of the 65^th Psalm; and no words can express the sensations with which I heard it sung. Were it possible to compress into one pulsation of the heart the pleasure which, in the whole period of my life, I have enjoyed in praise from the lips of mortal man, it would not weigh a straw to balance the ecstasy of delight which streamed from my eyes as the organ pealed and the choir of voices sung the praise of Almighty God from the soul of David, adapted to my native tongue by me. There was one drawback. In the printed book, the fifth line of the second stanza reads, ‘The morning’s dawn, the evening’s shade,’ and so it was sung, but the corresponding seventh line of the same stanza reads, ‘The fields from thee the rains receive,’ totally destroying the rhyme. I instantly saw that the fifth line should read,