Chapter I: PRAY you to admire my style of writing February. Began to write (1)

July, but the truth is, I nearly lost my wits on my journey. Twelve or thirteen mortal hours in getting to Hartford.{18} After two or three hours, called [165] up, just when the sleep had become so profound that on being waked I could not, for some seconds, settle it on what hemisphere, continent, country, or spot of the creation I was, nor why I was there at all. Then whisked away in the dark to the science-lighted domes of New Haven, but did n't see them--for why? I was asleep as I went through to the wharf. From the wharf, pitched into the steamboat, not having the points of compass, nor the time of day, nor the zenith and nadir of my own person. After two previous months of quiet, the whirl-about made me feel very "like an ocean weed uptorn And loose along the world of waters borne." If not a foundered weed, a very dumfoundered one at least.

{FN 18: Fifty miles}

To Rev. William Ware.

SHEFFIELD, Feb. 15, 1841.

How glad I am you wrote to me, my dear W. Is n't that a queer beginning? But there are people who say that everything natural is beautiful, and I am sure that first line was as natural as the gushing out of a fountain; for the very sight of your handwriting was as a sunbeam in a winter's day. By the bye, speaking of sunbeams, they certainly do wonders in winter weather. Have you ever seen such blue depths, or depths of blue, in the mountains, that it seemed as if the very azure of the sky had fallen and lodged in their clefts and leafless trees? Yesterday I was looking towards our barn roofs covered with snow,--and you know they are but six rods off,--and so deep was the color that I thought for the moment it was the blue of the distant horizon. [166] Our friend Catherine Sedgwick, writing to me a day or two ago, speaks in raptures of it. She says it is like the haze over Soracte or Capri.

So you see my paragraph has led me from winter to summer. Summer is gone to New York a week since. No doubt it will produce beautiful flowers in due time, many of them culled from far distant lands, but most of them native, I ween. Foreign seeds, you know, can do nothing without a good soil. In truth, I am looking with great interest for Catherine Sedgwick's book.

"Hard work to write." Yes, terribly hard it has been for me these two years past; but when I am vigorous, I like it. However, the pen is ever, doubtless, a manacle to the thought; draws it out, if you please, but makes a dragging business of it. By the bye, is your laziness making an apology for not finishing "Scenes in Judea "? Hear a compliment of my mother's for your encouragement. "I should think the man that could write the Letters from Palmyra,'--anything so beautiful and so powerful too" (her very words),--"could write anything."

I am delighted to hear of Mr. Farrar's being better. Give my love to them, and tell him I know of nothing in the world I could near with more pleasure than of his improvement. What a beautiful, gentle, precious spirit he is!

Yes, I grant you all about Cambridge; and if I don't go abroad, perhaps we will come and live with you a year or two. Something I must do; I get no better.

I can't guess your plaguy charade. I never thought of one a minute before, and I have ruminated upon yours an hour. [167] Oh that you were my colleague, or I yours, as you please!

With our love to your wife and children,

I am as ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To Dr. Channing.

NEW YORK, Sept. 30, 1841.

MY DEAR SIR,--I cannot go away for two years without taking leave of you. I wish I could do so by going to see you. But my decision to go is not more than three weeks old, and the intervening time has been overwhelmed with cares. Among other things, I have been occupied with printing a volume of sermons. I feel as if it were a foolish thing to confess, but I imagined that I had something to say about "human life" (that is my subject), though I warrant you will find it little enough. But then, you are accustomed to say so much better things than the rest of us, that you ought to distrust your judgment.

I sail for Havre on the 8th October with my family.

I am extremely glad to learn from Mrs. G. that your health is so good, and that you pass some time every day with your pen in hand. The world, I believe, is to want for its guidance more powerful writing, during twenty years to come, than it has ever wanted before, or will again, and I hope you will be able to do your part. Perhaps this is speaking more oracularly than becomes my ignorance; but it does appear to me that the civilized world is on the eve of a change and a progress, putting all past data at fault, and outstripping all present imagination. What questions are to arise and to be [168] hotly agitated about human rights, social position, lawful government, and the laws that are to press man down or to help him up? What Brownsons and Lamennais' and Strauss' are to come upon the stage, and to be confronted with sober and earnest reasoning?

But I did not think to put my slender finger into such great matters, but only to say adieu! If you would write me while abroad, you know it would give me great pleasure.

With my most kind and affectionate regards to Mrs. Channing, and my very heart's good wishes and felicitations to M., I am as ever,

Very truly your friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To Rev. William Ware.

PARIS, Dec. 25, 1841.

MY DEAR FELLOW,--You see how I begin; truth is, I feel more like writing a love-letter to you than a letter about affairs, or matters, or things; for have you not been my fellow more than anybody else has been? Have we not lived and labored together, have I not been in your house as if it were my own, and have you not come into my study many a time and oft, as little disturbing my thought, and seeming as much to belong there, as any sunbeam that glided into it? And furthermore, is not this anniversary time not only a fellowship season for all Christian souls, but especially a reminder to those who have walked to the house of God in company?

Still, however, it is of affairs that I have felt pressed to write you ever since I left home,--indeed, ever since I received your letter from Montreal. I have felt [169] that I ought at least to tell you that I see no prospect of doing anything that you desire of me. When I shall be able to address myself to any considerable task again, I know not. At present I am lying quite perdu. I have lost all faculty, but to read French histories, memoirs, novels, periodicals, etc., and to run after this great show-world of Paris,--Louvre, gallery, opera, what not. I am longing to get behind these visible curtains, and to know the spirit, character, manner of being, of this French people. At present all is problem to me. No Sunday, literally no cessation of labor, no sanctity of domestic ties with multitudes, no honesty or truth (it is commonly reported), but courtesy, kindness, it seems, and a sort of conventional fidelity,--for instance, no stealing; a million of people here, but without either manufactures or commerce on a great scale; petit manufacture, petit trade, petit menage, petit prudence unexampled, and the grandest tableaux of royal magnificence in public works and public grounds to be seen in the world; the rez-au-chaussee (ground floor) of Paris, a shop; all the stories above, to be let; a million of people, and nobody at home, in our American sense of the word; an infinite boutiquerie, an infinite bonbonnerie, an infinite stir and movement, and no deep moral impulse that I can see; a strange melange of the most shallow levity in society, the most atrocious license in literature, and the most savage liberalism in politics,--on the whole, what sort of people is it?

He bien!-to come down from my high horse before I break my neck,--here we are, at honest housekeeping; for we hope to pay the bills. Hope to pay, did I say? We pay as we go; that is the only way here; no stores, no larder, no bins, no garners,--the shops of [170] Paris are all this to every family. Our greatest good-fortune here is in having the Walshes for our next-door neighbors; and who should I find in Mrs. W. but a very loving cousin and hearty admirer of yours? She wishes to write a P. S. in my letter, and I am so happy to come to you in such good company, as well as to enhance the value of my letter with something better than I can write, that I very gladly give the space to her. I am only sorry and ashamed that it is so little. And so, with all our love to you all,

I am as ever yours,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To the Same.

CHAMPEL, NEAR GENEVA, July 18, 1842.

MY DEAR FELLOW AND FRIEND,--At the hour of midnight, with the moon shining in at my open window, the sound of the rushing Arve in my ears,--around me, a fine table of land a hundred feet above the stream that washes its base, and covered with a hundred noble chestnuts, and laid out with beautiful walks,--thus "being and situate," I take in hand this abominable steel pen to write you. Envy me not, William Ware! Let no man, that is well, envy him that is sick. If I were "lying and being and situate," as the deeds have it, and as I ought to have it, I should think myself an object of envy, that is, supposing I thought at all. No; in this charmed land, and in every land where I go, I bear a burden of diseased nerves which I might well exchange for the privilege of living on the Isle of Shoals, could I but have the constitution of some of its pechereux (by contraction, pesky) inhabitants.

. . . There has come a new day, and I have got a new [171] pen. Last night I was too much awake; I got up from my bed and wrote in my dressing-gown; to-day I am too much asleep. But allons, and see what will come of it.

This morning we walked into Geneva to church, the air so clear that it seemed as if we could count every tile on the houses. The chimneys are crowned with a forest of tin pipes, twisted in every direction to carry off smoke. At dusky eve, in a superstitious time, a man, coming suddenly upon the town, might think that an army of goblins had just alighted upon its roofs. . . . What stupendous things do ages accumulate upon every spot where they have passed! Every time we go into town we pass by the very place where Servetus was burned. And Geneva is old enough to have seen Julius Caesar!

. . . Here's another new day, William; and I wish I were a new man. But the heavens are bright, and the air so clear that I can define every man's patch of vineyard and farm on the Jura, ten miles off; every fissure and seam on Saleve, two miles back of us; and through a gap in the Saleve, I do not doubt, were I to go out on the grounds, I could see the top of Mont Blanc. And yet lay one or two ounces' weight on a man's brain, and a tackle, standing on the Jura, Saleve, and Mont Blanc together, can't lift him up. You see, I am resolved you shan't envy me. However, not to be too lugubrious, I am improving; that is, the paroxysms of this trouble are less severe, though I am far from being relieved of the burden.

But it is time I turn to your letter, which I received here with Henry's, on the 12th June. Thank him, for I cannot write you both now. Much news he gave me; [172] but how much that was distressing, and that concerning himself most of all. What is to become of our churches? And what is he to do? It relieves me very much to hear that Gannett's case is no worse. My love and sympathy to him when you see him. Is he not one of our noblest and most disinterested, as well as ablest men,--nay, as an extemporaneous speaker, unrivalled among us? . . .

To Miss Catherine M. Sedgwick.

CHAMPEL, NEAR GENEVA, July 13, 1842.

MY DEAR FRIEND,-The public prints have doubtless relieved me from what I should consider a most painful duty,--that of announcing to you the death of your friend Sismondi! He died on the 25th of last month. I saw Mme. Sismondi yesterday, and she desired me to tell you particularly that she must defer writing to you some little time; that she did not feel that she could write now, especially in a way to give you any comfort. She thought it was better that I should announce it to you, not seeming to be aware that the death of her husband is one of the events that the newspapers soon carry through the world. Indeed, the modesty of Sismondi and his wife is one of the things in them that has most struck me. Mme. S. said yesterday, in speaking of the commencement of your friendship, that "Sismondi was so grateful to her for finding him out." And Sismondi, when I saw him on my arrival, in expressing to me his regret and concern that it was so long since he had heard from you, said he knew that you had many letters to write, etc.; as if that could be the reason why you did not write to him! Well, there is more modesty in the world than we think, I verily believe. [173]. . . Speaking of her husband, Mme. S. said: "Of his acquisitions and powers, I say nothing; but it was such a heart,--there never was such a heart!"

I ought to add, while speaking of Mme. S., since we owe it all to you, that her reception of us was the kindest possible. She brought us all, children and all, to her house immediately to pass an evening, and indeed took all our hearts by storm,--if that can be said of a creature so gentle and modest. . . .

I wrote the foregoing this morning. At dinner-time your letter of June 12 came, which, with several others, has so turned my head, that I don't know whether it is morning or afternoon. We are conscious, "at each remove," of dragging "the lengthening chain," but we do not know exactly how heavy or how strong it is, till some one lays a hand on the other end. The lightest pressure there!--you know how it is when some one steps on the end of a long string which a boy draws after him. God bless you!--it was in my heart to say no less,--for thinking it is a long time. . . . We read and walk and talk and laugh, and sometimes sigh. Switzerland has no remedy against that. Of myself I have nothing to say that is worth the saying. I am improving somewhat, but I am suffering much and almost continually, and as yet I recover no energy for work.

To Rev. Henry W Bellows.

FLORENCE, ITALY, Nov. 24, 1842.

. . . It is now a fortnight or more since the overwhelming news came to us of the death of Channing. During this time my mind has been passing through steps of gradual approximation to the reality, but never did it [174] find, or else voluntarily interpose, so many barriers between itself and reality as in this most deplorable event. There are losses which I should more acutely feel than the loss of Channing; because friendship with him lacked, I imagine, in all who enjoyed it, those little familiarities, those fonder leanings, which leave us, as it were, bewildered and utterly prostrate when the beloved object is gone. But there is here a sense of general and irreparable loss, such as the people of a realm might be supposed to feel when its cherished head is suddenly taken away. For I suppose that no person sustained so many and such vital relations to the whole republic of thought, to the whole realm of moral feeling among us, as this, our venerated teacher and friend. To call him "that great and good man," does not meet the feeling we have about him. Familiar to almost nobody, he was near to everybody. His very personality seems to have been half lost in the sense of general benefit. He was one of those great gifts of God, like sunlight or the beauty of nature, which we scarcely know how to live without, or in the loss of which, at least, life is sadly changed, and the world itself is mournfully bereft.

But a letter affords no scope for such a theme; and besides, painful as it is to pass to common topics, they claim their dues. Life, ay, common life, must go on as it ever did, and nothing shall tear that infinite web of mystery in which it walks enveloped. Ours, however, in these days, is rather a shaded life. Absence from home, a strange land, a land, too, that sits in mourning over the great relics of the past,--all this tends to make it so. More material still is what passes within the microcosm, and I am not yet well. Not that I am worse, for I am continually better. But--but, in short, not to [175] speak too gravely, if a man feels as if one of the snakes of Medusa's head were certainly in his brain,--I have seen a horrible picture of the Medusa to-day by Leonardo da Vinci,--he cannot be very happy, you know. And if those around him be of such as "bear one another's burdens," then you see how the general conscience follows.

But let me not make the picture too dark, for the sake of truth and gratitude. Pleasantly situated we are, in his fair Florence, which grows fairer to my eye the more I see it. Our rooms look to the south, and down from a balcony upon a garden full of orange-trees, and roses End chrysanthemums in full bloom. . . . Then we have reading and music in-doors, and churches and palaces and galleries out-doors. And such galleries they grow upon me daily; the more ordinary paintings, or those hat seemed such at first, reveal something new on very new perusal. It is great reading with such walls or pages. Still there is a longing, almost a sick pining, or home at times. . .

To Rev. William Ware.

NEW YORK, Sept. 26, 1843.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Why have I not written to you, before? Every day for the last three weeks I have thought of it. I have been with you in thought, and with him, your dear brother,--my dear friend! If he should have known me and conversed with me, I could lot have refrained from making the journey to see him. How easy his converse ever was, how natural, how sensible [176] and humorous by turns, but especially so unforced that for me it always had a charm by itself. The words seemed to drop from our lips almost without our will, and yet with nobody could I get through so much conversation in so little time. Neither of us seemed to want much explanation from the other; I think we understood one another well.

Where is he now? With whom talks he now? Perhaps with Channing and Greenwood! Oh! are not the best of us gone; and all in one year! Was there ever such a year?

My dear William Ware, we must hold on to the ties of life as we may, and especially to such as unite you and me. But are you not getting a strange feeling of nonchalance about everything,--life, death, and the time of death, what matters it? I rather think it is natural for the love of life to grow stronger as we advance in life and yet it is so terribly shaken by the experience of life, and one is so burdened at times by the all-surrounding and overwhelming mystery and darkness, that one is willing to escape any way and on any terms.

I have your few kind words. I hope I shall have such oftener than once or twice a year. I will try to take care of myself, and to live. . . .

To the Same.

NEW YORK, Oct. 17, 1844.

MY DEAR WARE,--I ought not--I must not--I cannot--I dare not,--at least not at present. When the present stress is over. I may feel better. The fact is, at present I am scarcely fit to take care of my parish, and it would be madness to take upon myself any new [177] burden. See there a fine fellow I should be to have charge of the "Examiner," who have written present three times in as many lines! However, I am writing now in terrible haste, on the spur of an instant determination; for I must and will put this thing off from my mind. I have kept it there for a fortnight. I have wished to do this. First, because you wished it; secondly, because others wish it; and, thirdly, I had a leaning to it. In case of a colleagueship, and that must come, I might be glad of it. Bellows, too, would help me,--would take charge with me,--and that may be, if the thing is open by and by, but not now; I must not think of it any more now. I have not slept a wink all night for thinking of this and other things.

All this, my dear fellow, is somewhat confidential. I do not wish to be considered a good-for-nothing. Perhaps I shall rally. I was doing very well when I left the Continent. England overwhelmed me with engagements, and so it is here. With our love to your love and the children,

Yours as ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To the Same.

NEW YORK, Jan. 6, 1845.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I shall make no clue return for your good long letter; I have none of the Lambent light which plays around your pen wherewith to illuminate my page, and indeed am in these days, I am sorry to say, something more dark than usual. However, if wishes be such good things as you ingeniously represent, [178] I judge that attempts are worth something. Ergo, Q. S., which means good sequitur; it can hardly be a non sequitur, if nothing follows.

There! I have just touched all the points of your letter, I think. I have sent my light comment-stone skittering over your full smooth lake.

Well, I see you on the bank of your literal lake, your beautiful Menotomy,--beautiful as Windermere, only not so big; and I see the spring coming to cover that bank with verdure, and I long for both; that is, for spring and you. I always long for you, and for spring, I think I long for it more than I ever did It must be that I am growing old. Shall we ever meet, my friend, if not by Menotomy, by those fountains where Christ leads his flock in the immortal clime, and rejoin our beloved Henry, and Greenwood, and Channing? I am not sad, but my thoughts this winter are far more of death than of life. Ought one to part with his friends so? No; happy New Year to you. Hail the expected years, and the years of eternity! God bless you.

As ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To the Same.

SHEFFIELD, Aug. 18, 1845.

MY DEAR FRIEND,-. . . The whole previous page is to no purpose but to let you know that I have thought about you incessantly; for you know that I have a sympathy not only with your heart, but with your head, if that be again, as I suppose it is, the seat of your trouble. Heads certainly can bear a great deal. Mine has; and [179] I am now reading the work, in six volumes, of a man who was out of his head for years from hard study; and yet these volumes are full of thought, full of minute and endless explications on the greatest of subjects. It is the work of Auguste Comte on the "Philosophie Positive," essentially an attempt at a philosophic appreciation of the whole course of human thought and history. With an awfully involved style, with a great over-valuation of his own labor, he seems to me to have done a great deal. I have met with nothing on the philosophy of history to compare with it, as philosophy, though I have read Vico and Herder.

I shall not be easy till I know something about your health and plans. My vacation is nearly ended. I go down to New York the 1st of September. . . .

As ever yours,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To Rev. Henry W. Bellows.

SHEFFIELD, Aug. 25, 1845.

DEAR BELLOWS,--I thought to answer you in your own vein, but I am made very serious just now by reading the first five chapters of Matthew. How many things to think of! Does no doubt arise concerning those introductory chapters? And then what heart-penetrating, what tremendous teaching is that of the Sermon on the Mount!

In fact, though jests have flown pretty freely about the house, and hearty laughter is likely to be where the Deweys muster in much strength, yet I have had a pretty serious vacation. I set for my stent, to read the [180] New Testament, or the Gospels at least, in Greek, and to master the great work of Auguste Comte, and to write one or two sermons. With the philosopher I have spent the most time. Morning after morning, with none to annoy or make me afraid, I have gone out on the green grass under the trees, and, seated in the bosom of the world, I have striven with the great problem of the world. The account looks fanciful, perhaps, but the matter is not so; for amidst this solitude and silence, and this infinitude which nature opens to me as the city never does, I find the most serious and terrible business of my existence. I do not mean terrible in a bad sense; I have courage and faith, but I can gain no approach towards philosophical apathy.

We are well, and expect to go down on Wednesday next, and we too begin to feel a longing for New York and you. With our love to E.

As ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To Mrs. Ephraim Peabody.

NEW YORK, Oct. 24, 1845.

MY DEAR MRS. PEABODY,--Do not regret that you have let us have your husband a few days. He has done us much good; unless I am to put in the opposite scale his having stolen away the hearts of my children.

If you had heard him last evening, I think you would have been satisfied, though wives are hard to please. It was a majestical and touching ministration; I have never felt anything from the pulpit to be more so. The hearty, honest, terrible tears it wrung from me were [181] such as I have given to no sermon this many a day, I think, never. I hope you are better; and with all other good wishes, I am, Yours very truly,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To Rev. William Ware.

NEW YORK, Jan. 27, 1846.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--This week is a little breathing-time, the first I have allowed myself for five months; and my old pile of sermons shows such a sprinkling of new ones as it has not in any equal time these ten years. Sometimes I have thought I might get my head strong and clear again, and good as anybody's; but this last week has brought me to a stand, and made me think of that monitory prediction of yours when I came home, two years ago. . . . To be sure, I do not usually think of any retreat that will separate me entirely from New York. I have expected to live and die in connection with this church; but I have had a feeling this winter as if a new voice might be better for them; and any way it may be better for them to have one man than two; that is, myself and a colleague. Somewhere, indeed, I expect to preach as long as I can do anything, for I suppose this is my vocation, if I have any, poorly as it is discharged. Poorly; alas! how does this eternal ideal fly before us, and leave us ever restless and unsatisfied! How much Henry felt it! more, indeed, than I had thought, well as I knew his humility. And indeed I cannot help thinking that he did not sufficiently distinguish between outward and inward defect. I can very well understand how, in any right mind, the latter should give deep pain. But for Henry Ware to charge himself with indolence [182] and idleness,--with not doing enough! Why, he was ever doing more than his health would bear. The Memoir, I hardly need say, is read here with deep interest. Tell your brother, with my regards and thanks to him, that it appears to me a perfect biography in this,--that it placed me in the very presence of my friend, and made me feel, all the while I was reading it, as if he were with me. I laid it down, however, I may confess to you, with one sad feeling beyond that of the general loss; and that was that nowhere throughout was there one recognition of the friendship that bound me and Henry Ware together. It is nobody's fault, unless it be mine. And I am led sometimes to query whether there be not something strange about me in my friendly relations; some apparent repulsion, or some want of visible kindliness. One thing I do know; that we are all crushed down under this great wheel of modern life and labor, and friendships seem to have but poor chance of culture and expression.

To pass on; with regard to our New York churches, we have more visible activity this winter than usual. I hold a weekly evening meeting in the library of our church; Mr. Bellows also. Our Sunday school is reorganized, being divided into two, and the numbers are more than doubled; and we have formed a Unitarian Association for the State of New York, with headquarters in the hall over the entrance to the Church of the Divine Unity.

To the Same.

NEW YORK, May 4, 1846.

MY DEAR not "rugged and dangerous," but gentle and good-natured,--I foresee a biography (far be the [183] day when it shall be required!) in which it is not difficult to anticipate a passage running somewhat as follows: "He seemed to possess every attribute of genius but self-reliance. From this cause, doubtless, he failed to some extent of what he might otherwise have accomplished. He himself thought that the choice of his profession was the fatal mistake of his life; and perhaps he might have found a more congenial sphere. But it may be doubted whether his self-distrust might not have prevented him from putting forth his full strength, or rather, perhaps, from giving full play to his mind in any walk of literature or art. Even in those beautiful Oriental and Roman fictions there is a certain staidness, a measured step, from which he never departs. Even in some of those chapters of Zenobia, which a critic of the day pronounced to be `absolute inspiration,' the light glows through the smooth and polished sentences as through the crevices of plated armor. In fact, it was only in his familiar letters that his genius seemed to break out into perfect freedom. In these he approached the letters of Charles Lamb nearer than any writer of his day.

"There is a curious and really amusing specimen of his modesty in a letter of his to a friend of the name of Dewey,--if we read the name rightly in his somewhat illegible manuscripts. This Dewey, it seems, had published some sermons, or volumes of sermons, we know not which,--for they are long since swept down beneath the flood of time to that oblivion to which many cart-loads of such things are worthily destined,--and the author of Zenobia really addresses this forgotten preacher as his superior in strength, in power, and, it would seem, even in the felicities of style. We hope [184] the good man had too much sense, or humility at least, to have his head turned by such inexplicable fatuity."

Now I will thank you to preserve this letter among your papers, that the biographer may light upon some evidence of "the good man's" sanity.

. . . I do not think I shall go to the great May meetings in Boston. I am afraid I am not made for them. It wants a man, at any rate, with all his faculties about him, ready and apt and in full vigor; and mine are not,--certainly not now-a-days, if they ever are. The condition of my brain at present makes quiet necessary to me. Every exertion is now something too much.

I have addressed the trustees of the church to-day, to express my conviction to them that, by next autumn, some material change must be made. By that time all my sermons will be preached to death, and I shall have no power to make new ones. The church must determine whether it will relinquish my services entirely, or have them one quarter or one third of the time.

The thought of having soon to be clone with time and life has almost oppressed me for the year past, so constantly has it been with me. And indeed I have felt that there may be too much of this for the vigor, not to say the needful buoyancy, of life. Earth is our school, our sphere; and I more than doubt whether the anchorite's dreaming of heaven, or the spirit of the "Saints' Rest," is the true spiritual condition. I have long wanted to review Baxter's work, in this and other views.

With my love to your wife and children,--I mean, by your leave, your wife especially,--I am, as ever, Yours,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

[185] To the Same.

NEW YORK, July 10, 1846.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--If from this awful heat (90 degrees in my study) where I am busy, I were not going to an equally awful country heat where I shall be lazy, I would put off writing a few days. . . . My principal--no, I won't say that--my most painful business is hunting up sermons fit to be preached. The game grows scarce, and my greatest vexation is that every now and then, when I think I have got a fox or a beaver, it turns out to be a woodchuck or a muskrat.

From the tenor of some of our late letters, I believe we should be thought to belong to the "Mutual Admiration Society." I deny that of us both, though appearances are rather against us. I will have done, at any rate, for your last has quite knocked me down, or rather so outrageously set me up, as I was never before.

With regard to my plans, I myself prefer four months in the pulpit here, and that was what I proposed; but something had been said by me, about three months in a different connection, and the congregation, I am told, thought that in naming three they were conforming precisely to my wishes. But that will be arranged satisfactorily. I am to go out of town, of course; I cannot live here upon a quarter or third of a salary. I have something of my own, this house and a little more,--twelve thousand dollars, perhaps, in all; so far I have carried out the plan you speak of. I have had reasons more than most others for attending to the means, for I am the only surviving male member of my family. I have had the satisfaction of doing something for them all along, and shall have that of leaving to my mother [186] and sisters a house to cover them, and forty acres of land. . . .

Yours as ever, only more than ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To Rev. Henry W. Bellows.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 2, 1846.

MY DEAR BELLOWS,--Suppose I take my pen and write just what comes into my head. Did you expect things coming from anywhere else, I would like to know? It's a pretty serious condition, however. Conceive--I am to write in total forgetfulness that I am a Dr., and without any fear before my eyes of having it printed in a biography. Bah! if anybody ever did write letters that never could be printed anywhere, I am that person. What the reason is precisely, I do not know, but I always fancied it was because I had no time and no superfluous energies to throw away upon letters, any pore than upon conundrums. And I have fancied, too that when the blessed leisure days should come in the quiet country,--not only the otium cum dignitate, but he silence and the meditation,--that then I should pour myself out in letters. But the time has n't come yet. Consider that my leisure as yet extends to only about (I've pulled out my watch to see) three hours and twenty minutes. It is now Monday, 11: 20 A.M., and we did not arrive here till Saturday evening.

Let me hear from you as soon as ten thousand things will let you. You will easily see that there is no good reason why I have written this letter but this,--that have left the greater part of my heart in New York and naturally turn back to find it. Remind your three [187] houses of the stock they have in it, bad as it is; and, to be most sadly serious, remember my very affectionate regards to Mrs. Kirkland, and give my love to the -s and -s, and believe me,

Ever your friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To the Same.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10, 1846.

. . . FOR am I not through the one third of the second of the five months, and am I not very glad of it? And yet I am very glad I came away. You have no idea how I am relieved, and I shall not go back empty-handed. But the relief I feel admonishes me never to return to the full charge. How little do people know or conceive what it is! One case, like what I fear Mrs.-'s is, of slow decline,-one such case weighs upon the mind and heart for months. If you could go and make the call, without any sad anticipation or afterthought; but you cannot. And then, when it is not one case that draws upon your sympathies, but several, and you are made the confidant of many sorrows besides, and you are anxious for many minds; and when, moreover, your studies are not of the habitudes of bees, and the length of butterflies' wings, but wasting thoughts of human souls in sorrow and peril, and your Sundays rack your sinews with pain,--I declare I wonder that men live through it at all.

To the Same.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 1847.

MY DEAR BELLOWS,--I consider it a mercy to you to put some interval between my letters; indeed, I do [188] not know how you write any, ever; besides, I feel all the while as if some of your burdens were to be laid at the door of my delinquencies. . . . Indeed, I rejoice in you always. I never hear of you but to hear good of you; and it is often that I hear. . . .

As to the sermons I have been writing here, I consider your suggestion that you might read since you will not hear them such an enormous compliment, such a reckless piece of goodness, that all your duties in regard to them are fully discharged in the bare proposition. And I am not going to have you canonized and sent down to all ages as the most suffering saint in the nineteenth century, for having read twelve of Dewey's manuscript sermons. I have preached one of them this evening, and it made so much impression (upon, me) that I was quite taken by surprise. The title is "Nature.". . . Last week I wrote the most considerable lucubration of the winter, on the darkest problem in the philosophy of life and history, "the ministry of error and evil in the world," to wit, Polytheism, Despotism, War, and Slavery. . . . Always my poor mind and heart are struggling with one subject, and that is the great world-question.

You speak of my opportunities here. Perhaps I have not improved them very well. I am not very enterprising in the social relations, and half of the winter I have not cared for Washington, nor anything else but what was passing in my own mind. . . . I have met some admirable persons here, of those I did not know before. Crittenden and Corwin and Judge McLean have interested me most; men they seem to me of as fine and beautiful natures as one can well meet. I have had two interviews with Calhoun that interested me much; [189] and the other evening I met Soule, the Louisiana senator, and had a long conversation with him, chiefly about slavery,--a very remarkable person. There is no face in the Senate, besides Webster's, so lashed up with the strong lines of intellect; and his smile shines out as brightly and beautifully from the dark cloud of his features.

To his Daughter Mary.

NEW YORK, May 23, 1847.

DEAR MOLLY,--I thought M. E. D. made you m-a-d; but you shall have it hereafter, if it makes you "demnition" mad; no appreciation of my delicacy in leaving out the E,--which stands for error, egotism, eggnog, epsom-salts, and every erroneous entity extant. Yes, the E,--have it, with all its compounds. The fact is, I suppose, that when people retire up into the country, they grow monstrous avaricious, and exact everything that belongs to them; lay up their best clothes and go slip-shod. I'm preparing for that condition, mentally and bodily. You see I begin to slip already in language. Your mother is trying to persuade me to buy a dressing-gown. A dressing-gown! when I don't expect to dress at all. As if a beggar who never expects to dine were to buy a service of plate, or a starving man should have his picture taken, and give a hundred dollars for famine in effigy. I have ordered a suit of summer clothes, to be sure, because I feel very thin, and expect to feel very light some five weeks hence. I shall get some cigars by the same token, because all things with me are vanishing into smoke. And if thin clothes can't live, can't be distended, filled out, and look respectable, upon smoke, let 'em die, and be crushed before the moth.

[190] Monday morning. These tantrums, dear Molly, were--what? cut up?-last night after preaching, and mortal tired I was too. I do not know how it is, but it seems to me that every sermon I take now, every poor, little, innocent sermon comes bouncing out in the pulpit like a Brobdingnag.

To Rev. William Ware.

SHEFFIELD, Aug. 22, 1847.

DEAR FRIEND,--I don't like Commencements. I hate travelling. And just now I hate my pen so much that I can scarce muster patience to tell you so.

I have been reading Prescott's "Peru." What a fine accomplishment there is about it! And yet there is something wanting to me in the moral nerve. History should teach men how to estimate characters. It should be a teacher of morals. And I think it should make us shudder at the names of Cortez and Pizarro. But Prescott's does not. He seems to have a kind of sympathy with these inhuman and perfidious adventurers, as if they were his heroes. It is too bad to talk of them as the soldiers of Christ. If it were said of the Devil, they would have better fitted the character.

Monday morning. The shadows of the lilac fall upon my page, checkered with the slant rays of the morning light; there is a slope of green grass under the window; here is quiet all around; I wish you were here.

My love to your wife and children.

Yours as ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

[191]To the Same.

SHEFFIELD, Sept. 30, 1847.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I should have answered your letter of the 6th before, but sermons have been in hand or the first and second Sundays of October in New York, and my hand is commonly too weary, when engaged in such tasks, to turn to anything else.

I sent the late edition of my--things (works, they call 'em) to the Harvard College Library, and if you will take the second volume, you will see, in a sermon "On the Slavery Question," how entirely I agree with you hat this is the great trial question of the country. And I think it will press upon the country this coming winter is it never has before. It certainly will if the Californias are ceded to us, and the Wilmot Proviso is brought before Congress, not for hypothetical, but for practical, actual decision. If it should be, I entertain the most painful apprehensions for the result. We have lost a host by the death of Silas Wright. A sagacious politician said to a friend of mine the other day, "It is a special providence, for it has saved us from a dissolution of the Union." His opinion was that Silas Wright, if he lad lived, would have been President; and you know that he would have taken his stand on the Proviso.

The judgment of the individual to whom I have just referred presents the true issue. It is Policy against Right. I suppose there is not a man in New England who does not wish for the extinction of Slavery. I suppose there is hardly a man at the North who does not feel that the system is wrong, that it ought to be abolished, and must eventually be abolished; and that the only question about its abolition is a question of time. [192] But here is the peril,--that a good many persons in Congress and out of Congress will falter in their conviction before the determined stand of the South,--the determination, that is to say, to break off from the Union rather than submit to the Wilmot Proviso. And I do most seriously fear, for my part, that they would hold to that determination. But I am prepared, for myself, to say that, rather than yield the national sanction to this huge and monstrous wrong, I would take the risk of any consequences whatever. I reason for the nation as I would for myself. I say, rather than tell a lie, I would die. I cannot deliberately do wrong, and I cannot consent that my people shall. I would rather consent to the dismemberment of my right hand than to lay it in solemn mockery on the altar of injustice. As I have said in the sermon to which I have referred you, suppose that we were called upon to legalize polygamy or no marriage in California; would we do it? Certainly we would not, though all the Southern States should threaten to break off from us for our refusal, and should actually do it. I asked a similar question with regard to legalizing theft, in my sermon on the Annexation of Texas; and one of the stanchest opposers of the Wilmot Proviso once told me that that was the hardest instance he had ever been called upon to answer.

But though he felt the force of the moral parallel, still policy was carrying it with him over the right; or rather I should say, perhaps, that he resolved the right' of the matter into temporary expediency. He did not mean to cross the line of conscience, but he thought it should sway to this great emergency.

This, I say, is the great peril; and he who would raise up this nation to the height of this great argument, must [193] lift it to the determination to do no wrong,--must lift it high enough, in fact, to see that the right is the only true policy.

Who shall do it? You exhort me to write. I shall do so as I am able, and see occasion, as I have done. I shall scarcely refrain, I suppose, from writing this winter. But alas! I am broken in health, and am totally unable fairly and fully to grapple with any great subject. I have more than I can well, or, I fear, safely do to meet the ordinary calls of my pulpit.

In fact I am a good deal discouraged about my ability to do good in any way, unless it be by quiet study, and such fruits as may come of it. I have encountered so much misconstruction within a year past, or rather have come to the knowledge of so much, that I am seriously tempted, at times, to retire from the pulpit, from the church, from the open field of controversy in every form, and to spend the remainder of my days in studies, which, if they last long enough, may produce a book or two that will not subject me to that sort of personal inquisition which I find has beset me hitherto.

You may be surprised at my saying this, and may ask if I have not had as much honor and praise as I deserve. I do not deny it. But still there is, unless I am mistaken, a sort of question about me as a professional person,--about my professional sanctity, or strictness, or peculiarity, that moves my indignation, I must say, but (what is more serious) that makes me doubt whether, as a clergyman, I am doing any good that is proportionate to my endeavors, and inclines me to retreat from this ground altogether. How, for instance, if I have any desirable place in one denomination, could the "Christian World" venture to say that I had done more hurt [194] by my observation about teetotalism in my Washington discourse than all the grog-shops in the land! How could a clerical brother of mine seriously propose, as if he spoke the sense of many, to have me admonished about my habits of living,--of eating, he said, but perhaps he meant drinking, too,--my habits, who am a remarkably simple and small eater; and, as to wine, do not taste it one day in twenty! Yet this person actually attributed my ill-health to luxurious living. I live as list; I feast as other men feast, when I am at a feast, which is very rarely; I laugh as other men laugh; I will not have any clerical peculiarity in my manners; and if his cannot be understood, I will retire from the profession, for I will be a man more than a minister. I came unto the profession from the simplest possible impulse,--from a religious impulse; I have spoken in it as I would,--with earnestness, if nothing else,--and I cannot throw away this earnestness upon a distrusting community. Besides, I confess that I am peculiarly sensitive to personal wrong. I do not suppose that this blackguardism of the Abolition press would have found anywhere a more sensitive subject than I am. It fills me with horror,--as if I had been struck with a blow and beaten into the mire and dust in the very street.

I must have some great faults,--that is my conclusion,--and such faults, perhaps, as unfit me for doing much good. I open my heart to you. God bless you and yours.

Your assured friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

[195]To Mrs. David Lane.

SHEFFIELD, Oct. 19, 1847.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I cannot feel easy without knowing how little C. is getting along. I pray you to take your pen, if you are not too busy, or she too ill, and tell me how she is.