The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
EDUCATION / STATE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
Your welcome favor of the 12th came to hand two days ago. I was just
returned from Poplar Forest, which I have visited four times this
year. I have an excellent house there, inferior only to Monticello, am
comfortably fixed and attended, have a few good neighbors, and pass my
time there in a tranquillity and retirement much adapted to my age and
indolence.
I am very little able to walk, but ride freely
without fatigue. No better proof than that on a late visit to the
Natural Bridge I was six days successively on horseback from breakfast
to sunset. You enquire also about our University. All its buildings
except the Library will be finished by the ensuing spring. It will be
a splendid establishment, would be thought so in Europe, and for the
chastity of its architecture and classical taste leaves everything in
America far behind it. But the Library, not yet begun, is essentially
wanting to give it unity and consolidation as a single object. It will
have cost in the whole but 250,000 dollars. The library is to he on
the principle of the Pantheon, a sphere within a cylinder of 70 feet
diameter, -- to wit, one-half only of the dimensions of the Pantheon,
and of a single order only. When this is done you must come and see
it. I do not admire your Canada speculation. I think, with Mr.
Rittenhouse, that it is altogether unaccountable how any man can stay
in a cold country who can find room in a warm one, and should
certainly prefer, to polar regions of ice and snow, lands as fertile
and cheap which may be covered with groves of olives and oranges. I
envy M. Chaumont nothing but his French cook and cuisine. These are
luxuries which can neither be forgotten nor possessed in our country.
to an Unknown Recipient, 24 November 1821
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