Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D Part 16

or any other that Kane was in.

Your letters came Sat.u.r.day evening, and were, by that time, an indispensable comfort. . . .

This will be with you before the Thanksgiving dinner. Bless it, and you all, prayeth, giving thanks with and for you,

Your

ORVILLE DEWEY.

[247]Mr. Dewey had been asked repeatedly, since his retirement from New York, to take charge of Church Green, in Boston, a pulpit left vacant by the death of Dr. Young; and he consented to go there in the beginning of 1858, with the understanding that he should preach but once on a Sunday.

He had an idea of a second service, which should be more useful to the people and less exhausting to the minister than the ordinary afternoon service, which very few attended, and those only from a sense of duty.

He had written for this purpose a series of "Instructions," as he called them, on the 104th Psalm. Each was about an hour long, and they were, in short, simple lectures on religious subjects. To use his own words, "This was not preaching, and was attended with none of the exhaustion that follows the morning service. Many people have no idea, nor even suspicion, of the difference between praying and preaching for an hour, with the whole mind and heart poured into it, and any ordinary public speaking for an hour. They seem to think that in either case it is vox et preterea nihil, and the more voice the more exhaustion; but the truth is, the more the feelings are enlisted in any way, the more exhaustion, and the difference is the greatest possible."

[248] To William Cullen Bryant, Esq.

BOSTON, Sept. 7, 1858.

DEAR BRYANT,-You have got home. If you p.r.o.nounce the charm-word four times after the dramatic (I mean the true dramatic) fashion, all is told. It makes me think of what Mrs. Kemble told us the other day. In a play where she acted the mistress, and her lover was shot,--or was supposed to be, but was reprieved, and came rushing to her arms,--instead of repeating a long and pretty speech which was set down for her, the dramatic pa.s.sion made her exclaim: "ALIVE! ALIVE! alive!

alive!"

Well, you are such a nomadic cosmopolitan, that I won't answer for you; but I will be bound it is so with. Mrs. Bryant, and I guess Julia too.

How you all are, and how she is especially, is the question in all our hearts; and without waiting for forty things to be done, all working you like forty-power presses, pray write us three words and tell us.

. . . I hope that some time in the winter I shall get a sight of you.

You and the Club would make my measure full. And yet Boston is great.

To Mrs. David Lane.

BOSTON, Sept. 20, 1858.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Dr. Jackson is fast turning me into a vegetable,-h.o.m.o multi-cotyledonous is the species. My head is a cabbage--brain, cauliflower; my eyes are two beans, with a short cuc.u.mber between them, for a nose; my heart is a squash (very soft); my lungs--cut a watermelon in two, lengthwise, and you have them; [249]my legs are cornstalks, and my feet, potatoes. I eat nothing but these things, and I am fast becoming nothing else. I am potatoes and corn and cuc.u.mber and cabbage,--like the chameleon, that takes the color of the thing it lives on. Dr. Jackson will have a great deal to answer for to the world. Had n't you better come into town and see about it? Perhaps you can arrest the process. . . .

I declare I think it is too bad to send such a poor dish to you as this, and especially in your loneliness; but it is all. Dr. Jackson's fault.

Think of mosquito-bars in Boston! They must be very trying things--to the mosquitoes. You see they don't know what to make of it; and very likely their legs and wings get caught sometimes in the "decussated, reticulated interstices," as Dr. Johnson calls them. At any rate, from their noise, they evidently consider themselves as the most ill-treated and unfortunate outcasts upon earth. Paganini wrote the "Carnival of Venice." I wonder somebody does n't write the no-carnival of the mosquitoes.

To the Same.

BOSTON, Dec. 30, 1858.

DEAR MY FRIEND,--I cannot let the season of happy wishes pa.s.s by without sending mine to you and yours. But you must begin to gather up patience for your venerable friend, for the happy anniversaries somehow begin to gather shadows around them; they are both reminders and admonishers.

Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the "Happy New Year!" is never sounded out in the minor key; always it has a ring of joyousness and hope in it. Read that [250] little piece of f.a.n.n.y Kemble's,[FN: Mrs.

Kemble's Poems] on the 179th page,--the "Answer to a Question." I send you the volume 1 by this mail. Ah! what a clear sense and touching sensibility and bracing moral tone there is, running through the whole volume! But I was going to say that that little piece tells you what I would write better than I can write it. We all send "Merry Christmas"

and "Happy New Year" to you all, in a heap; that is, a heap of us to a heap of you, and a heap of good wishes.

My poor head is rather improving, but it is n't worth much yet, as you plainly see. Nevertheless, in the other and sound part of me I am,

As ever, your friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To his Sister, Miss F. Dewey.

[Date missing. About 1859.]

So you remember the old New Bedford times pleasantly,--and I do. And I remember my whole lifetime in the same way. And even if it had been less pleasant, if there had been many more and greater calamities in it, still I hold on to that bottom-ground of all thanksgiving, even this, that G.o.d has placed in us an immortal spark, which through storm and cloud and darkness may grow brighter, and in the world beyond may shine as the stars forever. I heard Father Taylor last Sunday afternoon.

Towards the close he spoke of his health as uncertain and liable to fail; "But," said he, "I have felt a little more of immortality come down into me today, and as if I should live awhile longer here."

[251]To Mrs. David Lane.

BOSTON, Sat.u.r.day evening [probably Oct., 1859]

DEAR MY FRIEND,--I imagine you are all so cast down, forlorn, and desolate at my leaving you, and especially "At the close of the day, when the hamlet is still, And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove, When naught but the torrent is heard on the hill, And naught but the nightingale's song in the grove," that I ought to write a word to fill the void. I should have said, on coming away, like that interesting child who had plagued everybody's life out of them, "come again!"

Bah! you never asked me; or only in such a sort that I was obliged to decline. Am I such a stupid visitor? Did I not play at bagatelle with L.? Did I not read eloquently out of Carlyle to you and C.? Did I not talk wisdom to you by the yard? Did I not let drop crumbs of philosophy by the wayside of our talk, continually? Above all, am I not the veriest woman, at heart, that you ever saw? Why, I had like to have choked upon "Sartor Resartus." I wonder if you saw it. But, ahem!-a great swallow a man must have, to gulp down the "Everlasting Yea." And a great swallow implies a great stomach. And a great stomach implies a great brain, unless a man's a fool. "If not, why not?" as Captain Bunsby says; "therefore."

Oh, what a mad argument to prove swan sane,--and good company besides I Well, I am mad, and expect to be so,-at least I think I have a right to be so, in the proportion of one hour to twenty-four, being so rational the rest of the time. I think it's but a reasonable allowance. [252] You will judge that this is my mad hour to-day, and it is; nevertheless, I am, soberly,

Your friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

In the winter of 1859 he writes to the same friend upon New York City politics with a pa.s.sionate vivacity that old New Yorkers will sadly appreciate.

"I took up the paper this morning that announced Fernando Wood's election by two thousand plurality. If you had seen the way in which I brought down my hand upon the table,--minding neither muscle nor mahogany, you would know how people at a distance, especially if they have ever lived in New York, feel about it. I hope he will pay you well. I wish he would take out some of your rich, stupid, arms-folding, purse-clutching millionnaires into Washington Square and flay them alive. Something of the sort must be done, before our infatuated city upper cla.s.ses will come to their senses."

To his Sister, Miss F. Dewey.

SHEFFIELD, Oct. 5, 1859.

I HAVE got past worrying about things, myself. I see all these movements, this way and that way, as a part of that great oscillation in which the world has been swinging, to and fro, from the beginning, and always advancing. These are the natural developments of the freed mind of the world; and whoever lives now, and yet more, whoever shall live through this century, must take this large and calm philosophy to his heart, or he will find himself cast upon the troubled waters without rudder [253] or compa.s.s. Daniel Webster, one day at Marshfield, when his cattle came around him to take an ear of corn each from his hand, said to Peter Harvey, who was by, as he stood looking at them, "Peter, this is better company than Senators." So I am tempted to turn from all the religious wranglings and extravagances of the time, to nature and to the solid and unquestioned truths of religion. I sometimes doubt whether I will ever read another word of the ultraists and the one-sided men. They will do their work, and it will all come to good in the long run; but it is not necessary that I should watch it or care for it. I did, indeed, print a political sermon four months ago, and I said a few words in the "Register" last week (which I will send you), but I am not the man to be heard in these days. I can't take a side. . . .

Yours as always,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To William Cullen Bryant, Esq.

SHEFFIELD, May 7, 1860.

WELL, did I address you as a poet, Magnus; for none but a poet or a Welshman could write such a reply. Do you know I am Welsh? So was Elizabeth, Tudor; so is f.a.n.n.y Kemble, and other good fellows.

Well, I take your poetry as if it were just as good as prose. But you don't consider, my dear fellow, that if we make our visit when I go down to preach for Bellows, that I can't preach for your Orthodox friend. . . .

Oh, ay, I quite agree with you about leaving the world-melee to others.

For my part, I feel as if I were dead and buried long ago. You said, awhile ago, that you did n't so well like to work as you once did.

Sensible, [254] that. I feel the same, in my bones--or brains. There it is, you always say, what I think; except sometimes, when you scathe the opponents,--for I am tenderhearted. I don't like to have people made to feel so "bad." Seriously, I wonder that some of you editors are not beaten to death every month. Ours is a much-enduring society. I could enlarge, but I have n't time; for I must go and set out some trees--for posterity.