A very real and tumultuous passion this of young Tom Jefferson's! Every letter he writes to his friend teems with reference to _her_. Now she is R. B.; again Belinda; and again, with that deep secrecy of dog Latin so dear to the collegian, she figures as _Campana in die_ (bell in day); or, still more mysteriously, as Adnileb, written in Greek that the vulgar world may not pry into the sacred secret. Oh, youth, youth, how like is the nineteenth century to the eighteenth, and that to its preceding, till we reach the courtship of Adam and Eve! In October, '63, he writes to his old confidant: "In the most melancholy fit that ever any poor soul was, I sit down to write you. Last night, as merry as agreeable company and dancing with Belinda in the Apollo could make me, I never could have thought the succeeding sun could have seen me so wretched as I now am!... I was prepared to say a great deal. I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me in as moving a language as I knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner. But, good God! when I had an opportunity of venting them, a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the too visible marks of my strange confusion." The framer of the Declaration of Independence, whose eloquence startled the world, found himself tongue-tied and stammering in a declaration of love to a provincial maiden. At twenty-nine or thirty Jefferson had recovered enough to go a-courting again, to Mistress Martha Skelton, a young and childless widow, of such great beauty that many rivals contested with him the honor of winning her hand. The story goes that two of these rivals met one evening in Mrs. Skelton's drawing-room. While waiting for her to enter, they heard her singing in an adjoining room, to the accompaniment of Jefferson's violin. The love-song was so expressively executed that the admirers perceived that their doom was sealed, and, picking up their cocked hats, they stole out without waiting for the lady. If Jefferson in his younger days was soft-hearted toward the gentler sex, his susceptibility was as nothing compared to Washington's. The sentimental biography of that great man would be more entertaining than the story of his battles, or his triumphs of government. There are evidences in his own handwriting that, before he was fifteen years old, he had conceived a passion for a fair unknown beauty, so serious as to disturb his otherwise well-regulated mind, and make him seriously unhappy. His sentimental poems written at that age, are neither better nor worse than the productions of most boys of fifteen. One of them hints that bashfulness has prevented his divulging his passion: "Ah, woe is me, that I should love and conceal! Long have I wished and never dare reveal."