Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D Part 9

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! G.o.d 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 gra.s.s 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 n.o.body'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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sociation 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 antic.i.p.ate a pa.s.sage 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 Zen.o.bia, which a critic of the day p.r.o.nounced 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 ma.n.u.scripts. 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 Zen.o.bia 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 princ.i.p.al--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.