Chapter I: DON'T see but you must insert these articles in the "Inquirer" as

"Communications." Some of them will have things in them that cannot possibly be delivered as Wegotisms. Don't be stiff about the matter. I tell you there is no other way; and indeed I think it no harm, but an advantage, to diversify the form, and leave out the solemn and juridical Wego sometimes, for the more sprightly and "sniptious" Ego.

To his Daughter Mary.

WASHINGTON, May, 1852.

DEAREST MOLLY,--To be sure, how could you? And, indeed, what did you for? Oh! for little K.'s sake. Well, anything for little K.'s sake. Indeed, it's the duty of parents to sacrifice themselves for their children. It's the final cause of parents to mind the children. Poor little puss! We shall feel relieved when we hear she is in New York, and safe under the sisterly wing. I am afraid she is getting too big for nestling. How I want to see the good little comfort! Is she little? Tell us how she looks and does.

Yesterday, beside preaching a sermon more than half new, and attending a funeral (out of the society), I read skimmingly more than half Nichol's "Architecture of the Heavens." I laid aside the book overwhelmed. What shall we do? What shall we think? Far from our [226] Milky Way,--there they lie, other universes,--rebuke resolved by Rosse's telescope into stars, starry realms, numerous, seemingly innumerable, and as vast as our system; and yet from some of them it takes the light thirty--sixty thousand years to come to us: nay, twenty millions, Nichol suggests, I know not on what grounds. And yet in the minutest details such perfection! A million of perfectly formed creatures in a drop of water! I do not doubt that it is this overwhelming immensity of things that leads some minds to find a sort of relief, as it were, in the idea of an Infinite Impersonal Force working in all things. But it is a child's thought. Nay, does not the very fact that my mind can take in so vast a range of things lead me better to conceive of what the Infinite Mind can do? An ant's mind, if it had one, might find it just as hard to conceive of me.

With love to you two miserable creatures, away from your parents,

Thine ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To the Same.

[Undated.]

What have I not written to you about, you cross thing? Oh! Kossuth. Well, then, here is an immensely interesting person, whom we invited over here to settle, and who is much more likely to unsettle us. How far would you have him unsettle us? To the extent of carrying us into a war with Russia, or of banding us, with all liberal governments, in a war with the despotic governments, so that Europe should be turned into a caldron of blood for years to come, millions of people sacrificed, [227] unutterable miseries inflicted, the present frame of society torn in pieces; and, when all is done, the human race no better off,--worse off? You say, no. Well, anything short of that I am willing Kossuth should accomplish. Any expression of opinion that he can get here, from the people or the government, asserting the rights of nations and the wrong of oppression, let him have,--let all the world have it. Moral influence, gradually changing the world, is what I want. But Kossuth and the Liberals of Europe want to bring on that great war of opinion, which, I fear, will come only too soon. I fear that Kossuth has fairly broached the question of intervention here, and that in two years it will enter the ballot box. I fear these tendencies to universal overthrow that are now revealing themselves all over the civilized world.

Kossuth is a man all enthusiasm and eloquence, but not a man, I judge, of deep practical sagacity. A sort of Hamlet, he seems to me,--graceful, delicate, thoughtful, meditative, moral, noble-minded; and I should not wonder if he was now feeling something of Hamlet's burden: "The time is out of joint: oh, cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!"

A lady, who saw him two days ago, told me that so sad a face she never saw; it haunted her.

It was on his return to his Berkshire home, after this winter in Washington, that the next merry little letter, describing his renewed acquaintance with his country neighbors, was sent to me. The custom of ringing the church bell at noon and at nine in the evening had not then been relinquished, although it has since died out.

[228] To his Daughter Mary.

SHEFFIELD, July 23, 1852.

DEAR MOLLY,--Dr. K. and H. called upon us the very evening after we arrived! Mrs. K. as usual. Mrs. B. is on a visit to her friends; the children with their grandmother. . . . Mr. D. does n't raise any tobacco this summer. I saw Mr. P. lying fiat on his back yesterday,--not floored, however, but high and dry on Mr. McIntyre's counter. Mr. M. has succeeded Doten, Root, and Mansfield. These three gentlemen have all flung themselves upon the paper-mill, hardly able to supply the Sheffield authors. Mr. Austin continues to announce the solemn procession of the hours. Mr. Swift is building an observatory to see 'em as they pass. There are thoughts of engaging me to note 'em down, as I have nothing else to do.

I am particularly at leisure, having demitted all care of the farm to Mr. Charles, and committed all the income thereof to him, down to the smallest hen's-egg.

Your mother is always doing something, and always growing handsomer and lovelier, so that I told her yesterday I should certainly call her a sa-int, if she was n't always a do-int

I have nothing to tell of myself; no stitches or aches to commemorate, being quite free and whole in soul and body, and, freely and wholly

Your loving father,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

[229] To Rev. Henry W. Bellows.

SHEFFIELD, July 24, 1852.

MY DEAR BELLOWS,--Amidst all this lovely quiet, and the beautiful outlooks on every side to the horizon, my thoughts seem ever to mingle with the universe; they bear me beyond the horizon of life, and your reflections, therefore, fall as a touching strain upon the tenor of mine. Experience, life, man, seem to me ever higher and more awful; and though there is constantly intervening the crushing thought of what a poor thing I am, and my life is, and I am sometimes disheartened and tempted to be reckless, and to say, "It's no matter what this ephemeral being, this passing dust and wind, shall come to,"--yet ever, like the little eddying whirlwinds that I see in the street before me, this dusty breath of life struggles upward. I am very sad and glorious by turns; and sometimes, when mortality is heavy and hope is weak, I take refuge in simple resignation, and say: "Thou Infinite Goodness! I can desire nothing better than that thy will be done. But oh! give me to live forever!--eternal rises that prayer. Give me to look upon thy glory and thy glorious creatures forever!" What an awful anomaly in our being were it, if that prayer were to be denied! And what would the memory of friends be, so sweet and solemn now,--what would it be, but as the taper which the angel of death extinguishes in this earthly quagmire?

After you went away, I read more carefully the splendid article on the "Ethics of Christendom;"{21} and I confess that my whole moral being shrinks from the position [230] of the writer (which brings down the majesty of the Gospel almost to the level of Millerism), that Jesus supposed the end of the world to be at hand, and that he should come in the clouds of heaven, and be seated with his disciples on airy thrones, to judge the nations. No; the false double ethics of the pulpit, which I have labored, though less successfully, all my life to expose, has its origin, I believe, in later superstition, and not in the teachings of Christ.

{FN 21: From the "Westminster Review," vol. lvii. p. 182, or,
in the American edition, p. 98.}

The passages referred to by the writer, I conceive to be more imaginative, and less formalistic and logical, than he supposes.

To the Same.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 28, 1852.

MY DEAR BELLOWS,--I will wish you all a happy New York, (ahem! you see how naturally and affectionately my pen turns out the old beloved name)--a happy New Year. After all, it isn't so bad; a happy New Year and a happy New York must be very near neighbors with you. I sometimes wish they could have continued to be so with me, for those I have learnt to live with most easily and happily are generally in New York. Our beloved artists, the goodly Club, were a host to me by themselves. I wish I could be a host to them sometimes.

Well, heigho! (pretty ejaculation to come into a New Year's greeting--but they come everywhere!) Heigho! I say submissively --things meet and match us, perhaps, better than we mean. I am not a clergyman--perhaps was never meant for one. I question our position more and more. We are not fairly thrown into the field of life. We do not fairly take the free and [231] unobstructed pressure of all surrounding society. We are hedged around with artificial barriers, built up by superstitious reverence and false respect. We are cased in peculiarity. We meet and mingle with trouble and sorrow,--enough of them, too much,--but our treatment of them gets hackneyed, worn, weary, and reluctant. They grapple with the world's strife and trial, but it is an armor. Our excision from the world's pleasure and intercourse, I doubt, is not good for us. We are a sort of moral eunuchs.

To his Daughter Mary.

WASHINGTON, June 19, 1853.

THOUGH it is very hot,

Though bladed corn faint in the noontide ray, And thermometers stand at ninety-three, And fingers feel like sticks of sealing-wax, Yet I will write thee.

This evening I saw Professor Henry, who said he saw you at the Century Club last Wednesday evening; that le did not speak to you, but that you seemed to be enjoying yourself. I felt like shaking hands with him on the occasion, but restrained myself. But where are you, child, this blessed minute? . . . I would have you to know that it is a merit to write to somebody who is nowhere. Why in thunder don't you write to me? If I were nobody, I am somewhere. I hope you are enjoying yourself, but I can't think you can, conscientiously, without telling me of it.

My love to the Bryants. I hope it may greet the Grand Panjandrum himself. Tell Mrs. C. I should write to her, but I have too much regard for her to think of [232] such a thing with the thermometer at 93 degrees, and that it is as much as I can do to keep cool at any time, when I think of her.

To Mrs. David Lane.

SHEFFIELD, Sept. 2, 1853.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Do you remember when we were walking once in Weston, that we saw the carpenter putting sheets of tarred paper under the clapboarding of a house? I want you to ask your father if he thinks that a good plan; if he knows of any ill effect, as, for instance, there being a smell of tar about the house, or the tar's running down between the clapboards. If he thinks well of it (that is question first); question second is, What kind of paper is used? and question third, Is it simply boiled tar into which the paper is dipped? I state precisement, and number the queries, because nobody ever yet answered all the questions of a letter. I hope in your reply you will achieve a distinction that will send down your name to future times. . . .

To the Same.

Sept. 9, 1853.

You have achieved immortal honor; the answers, Numbers 1, 2, and 3, are most satisfactory. I have thoughts of sending your letter to the Crystal Palace. I am much obliged to your father, and I will avail my-self of his kindness, if I should find it necessary, next rear, when I may be building an addition here.

I am sorry things don't go smoothly with-; but I guess nothing ever did go on without some hitches, that s, on this earth. It is curious, by the bye, how we go in blindly, imagining that things go smoothly with many [233] people around us,--with some at least,--with some Wellington, or Webster, or Astor, when the truth is, they never do with anybody. To take our inevitable part with imperfection, in ourselves, in others, in things,--to take our part, I say, in this discipline of imperfection, without surprise or impatience or discouragement, as a part of the fixed order of things, and no more to be wondered at or quarrelled with than drought or frost or flood,--this is a wisdom beyond the most of us, farther off from us, I believe, than any other. Ahem! when you told me of those rocks in the foundation of the house, you did not expect this "sermon in stones.". . .

To William Cullen Bryant.

SHEFFIELD, May 13, 1854.

DEAR EDITOR,--Are we to have fastened upon us this nuisance that is spreading itself among all the newspapers,--I mean the abominable smell caused by the sizing or something else in the manufacture? For a long time it was the "Christian Register" alone that had it, and I used to throw it out of the window to air. Now I perceive the same thing in other papers, and at length it has reached the "Post." Somebody is manufacturing a villanous article for the paper-makers (I state the fact with an awful and portentous generality.) But do you not perceive what the nuisance is? It is a stink, sir. I am obliged to sit on the windward side of the paper while I read its interesting contents, and to wash my hands afterwards--immediately.

But, to change the subject,--yes, toto aelo,-for I turn to something as fragrant as a bed of roses,--will [234] not you and Mrs. Bryant come to see us in June? Do. It is a long time since I have sat on a green bank with you, or anywhere else. I want some of your company, and talk, and wisdom. The first Lowell Lecture I wrote was after a talk with you here, three or four years ago. Come, I pray, and give me an impulse for another course. Bring Julia, too. I will give her my little green room.

I shall be down in New York on business a fortnight hence, and shall see you, and see if we can't fix upon a time.

With all our loves to you all,

Yours as ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

Mr. Dewey's father died at the very beginning of his son's career, in 1821, and early in 1855 he lost also his mother from her honored place at his fireside. He was, nevertheless, obliged to leave home in March, to fulfil an engagement made the previous autumn to lecture in Charleston, S. C.

To his Daughter Mary.

CHARLESTON, March 16, 1855.