Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D Part 22

Yes, fruity,--that 's what Bryant is; but rather of the quality of dried fruits,--not juicy, still less gus.h.i.+ng, but [299] with a good deal of concentrated essence in him (rather "frosty, but kindly "), exuding often in little bits of poetical quotations, fitly brought in from everywhere, and of which there seems to be no end in his memory.

The woods are beginning to show lovely bits of color, but the great burden of leaves remains untouched. Bryant and I walked out to the Pine Grove, and on to Sugar-Maple Hill. Your mother admires him for his much walking; but I insist that he is possessed and driven about by a demon.

. . . By the bye, just keep that "article" for me; I have no other copy. Bryant commended it, and said he thought the argument against the Incomprehensible's being totally unintelligible, was new.

To his Daughter, Mrs. C.

ST. DAVID'S, July 22, 1868.

DEAR KATE,--I am going to have no more to do with the weather. You need n't expostulate with me. It 's no use talking. My mind is made up.

You may tell M. so. It will be hardest for her to believe it. She has partaken with me in that infirmity of n.o.ble minds,--a desire to look through the haze of this mundane atmospheric environment, and predict the future. But, alas I there is an infirmity of vision; we see through a gla.s.s darkly. We can't see through a millstone. The firmament has been very like that, for some days,--all compact with clouds. We thought something was grinding for us. "Now it is coming!" we said last evening.

But no. It was no go,--or no come, rather. And this morning, at the breakfast table, sitting up [300] there, clothed, and in my right mind, I said to my sister, "I am not a-going to predict about the weather any more!"

Ask my dear M., pray her, to try to come up to the height of that great resolution. I know the difficulty,-the strain to which it will put all her faculties; but ask her, implore her, to try.

To his Daughters, then living in London Terrace, New York.

1868.

Sr. DAVID'S sends a challenge to all the Terrace birds.

Show us a bird that sings in the night. We have a nightingale,--a bird that has sung, for two evenings past, between ten and twelve, as gayly as the nightingales of Champel. It is the cat-bird, the same that comes flying and pecking at our windows. What has come over the little creature? I suppose the season of nest-building and incubation is one of great excitement,--the bird's honeymoon. And then, the full moon s.h.i.+ning down, and the nights warm as summer, and thoughts of the nice new house and the pretty eggs, and the chicks that are coming,--it could not contain itself.

Well, as I sit in my porch and look at the birds, they seem to me a revelation, as beautiful, if not so profound, as the Apocalypse. What but Goodness could have made a creature at once so beautiful and so happy? Mansel and Spencer may talk about the incomprehensibility of the First Cause; I say, here is manifestation. The little t.u.r.dus Felivox,--oho! ye ignorant children, that is he of the cat,--it sits on the bough, ten feet from me, and sings and trills and whistles, and sends [301] out little jets of music, little voluntaries, as if it were freely and irrepressibly singing a lovely hymn.

This morning there is the slightest little drizzle, a mere tentative experimenting towards rain, no more,-I keep to facts. Well, all the towns.h.i.+p is saying, no doubt, "Now it is coming!" Catch me a-doing so! I was left to say, in an unguarded moment, "If C. had mowed his meadow two or three days ago, he would have got it all in dry." I feel a little guilty. I am afraid that incautious observation was the nuance of the shadow of an intimation of an opinion, bearing the faintest adumbration of a prediction: I am sorry for it. I am very sorry. I ought to have kept my lips shut. I ought to have put sealing-wax upon them the moment I got up. I won't,--I won't speak one word again.

Yours, wet or dry,

O. D

To William Cullen Bryant, Esq.

ST. DAVID'S, July 27, 1868.

FRIEND BRYANT,--I am a Quaker. I have just joined the sect. Thee won't believe it, because thee will think I lack the calmness and staidness that fit me for it. But I am a Quaker of the Isaac T. Hopper sort; though, alas! here the resemblance fails also, for I do no good. Dear me! I wish sometimes that I could have been one of the one-sided men; it is so easy to run in one groove! and it 's all the fas.h.i.+on in these days. But, avaunt expediency! Let me stick to my principles, and be a rounded mediocrity, pelted on every hand, and pleasing [302] n.o.body. By the bye, Mrs. Gibbons [Mrs. James Gibbons of New York, daughter of Isaac T. Hopper] I has just sent me a fine medallion of her, father, beautifully mounted. It is a remarkable face, for its ma.s.sive strength and the fun that is lurking in it. Hopper might have been a great man in any other walk,--the statesman's, the lawyer's; he was, in his own.

. . . I want to say something, through the "Post," of the abominable nuisance of the railroad whistle. I wrote once while you were gone, and Nordhoff (how do you spell him?) did n't publish my letter, but only introduced some of it in a paragraph of his own. If I write again, I shall want your imprimatur. This horrible shriek, which tears all our nerves to pieces, and the nerves of all the land, except c.u.mmington and such lovely retirements, is altogether unnecessary; a lower tone would answer just as well. It does on the Hudson River Road.

To his Daughters.

ST. DAVID'S, Oct. 15, 1868.

. . . YOUR letter came yesterday, and was very satisfactory in the upshot; that is, you got there. But, pest on railroad cars I they are mere torture-chambers, with the additional chance, as Johnson said of the s.h.i.+p, of being land-wrecked. Some people like 'em, though. And there are dangers everywhere. The other day-a high windy day--a party went to the mountain, and had like to have been blown off from the top. But they said it was beautiful. I don't doubt, if the whole bunch had been tumbled over and rolled down to the bottom, they would all have jumped up, exclaiming, "Beautiful! [303] beautiful!" People so like to have it thought they have had a good time. One day they went up and all got as wet as mountain--no, as marsh--rats; and that was the most "lovely time"

they have had this summer.

Girls, I have a toothache to-day! It 's easier now, or I should not be writing. But pain, what a thing it is! The king of all misery, I think, is pain. It is a part of you, and does n't lie outside; a thing to be met and mastered with healthy faculties. You can't fight with it, as you can with poverty, bankruptcy, mosquitoes, a smoky chimney, and the like.

I can't be thankful enough that I have had, through my life, so little pain. What I shall do with it, if it comes, I don't know. Perhaps I need it for what Heine speaks of; that is, to make me "a man." I am afraid I am a chicken-hearted fellow. But I cannot help thinking that different const.i.tutions take that visitation very differently.

To Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D.

ST. DAVID'S, Jan. 18, 1869.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--. . . It is the audible, the uttered prayer, to which I feel myself unequal. The awfulness of prayer to me inclines me more and more to make it silent, speechless. It is so overwhelming, that I am losing all fluency, all free utterance. What it is fit for a creature to say to the Infinite One--to that uncomprehended Infinitude of Being--makes me hesitate. My mind addressing a fellow mind is easy; and yet addressing the highest mind in the world would cause me anxiety.

I should feel that my thoughts were too poor to express to him. But my mind addressing itself, its [304] thought and feeling, to the Infinite, Infinite Mind,--I faint beneath it. It is higher than heaven; what can I do? I am often moved to say with Abraham, "Lo! now I, who am but dust, have taken upon me to speak unto G.o.d. Oh! let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak." And indeed, so much praying,-this imploring the love and care of the Infinite Providence and Love, of which the universe is the boundless and perpetual evolution,--can that be right and fit? I often recall what Mrs. Dwight, of Stockbridge, said of the public devotions of old Dr. West,--one of the most saintly beings I ever knew,--that she had observed that they consisted less and less of prayers, and more and more of thanksgivings.

Last evening my wife read to us your article on the Mission of America.

It is a grand, full stream of thought, and original, too, and ought to have a wider flow than through the pages of the "Examiner." It ought to be read not by two thousand, but by two million persons. I wish there were a popular organ, like the "Ledger" (in circulation), for the diffusion of the best thoughts, where the best minds among us could speak of the country to the country, for never was there a people that more needed to be wisely spoken to. And you are especially fitted to speak to it. Your conservative position in our Unitarian body, however it may fare among us, would help you with the people.

As to your position, I don't know but I am as conservative as you are.

That is, I don't know but I believe in the miracles as much as you do.

The difference between us is, that I do not feel the miraculous to be so essential a part of Christianity. Yet I see and feel the force of what you say about it. And the argument is [305] put in that article of yours with great weight and power. For myself, I cannot help feeling that at length the authority of Jesus will be established on clearer, higher, more indisputable and impregnable grounds than any historic, miraculous facts.

To William Cullen Bryant, Esq.

ST. DAVID'S, Jan. 26, 1869.

. . . I AM thankful, every day of my life, that I have my own roof over me, and can keep it from crumbling to the ground. Do not be proud, Sir, when you read this, nor look down from your lordliness,--of owning a dozen houses, and three of them your own to live in,--down, I say, upon my humble grat.i.tude. Can it be, by the bye, that Cicero had fourteen villas? I am sure Middleton says so. I should think they must have been fourteen of what Buckminster, in a sermon, called "bundles of cares and heaps of vexations."

. . . I read a letter of Cicero's to his friend Valerius, this morning, in which he urges him to come and see him, saying that he wants to have a pleasant time with him,--tec.u.m jocari,-and says, "When you come this way, don't go down to your Apulia,"--to wit, c.u.mmington. Nam si illo veneris, tanquam Ulysses, cognosces tuorum neminem. Now don't quote Homer to me when you answer, for I am nearly overwhelmed with my own learning.

I wish you could have seen the world here for the last three weeks.

Never was such a splendid winter season. I think it 's something great and inspiring to see the whole broad, bright, white, crystal world, and the whole [306] horizon round, instead of looking upon brick houses. But you will say, the human horizon widens in cities. Yes; but if there are six bright points in it you are fortunate, while here, the whole horizon round is sapphire and purple and gold.

Well, peace be with you wherever you are, and with your house. My wife and Mary send love to you all, as I do, [who] am, as ever.

Yours faithfully,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To his Daughters.

ST. DAVID'S, Feb. 23, 1869.

. . . WE are going on very nicely, neither sick nor sad. Our winter evening readings have been very fortunate this season. First, "Lord Jeffrey's Life and Letters," and now, "Draper's Intellectual Development in Europe." I had read it before, but it is a greater book than I had thought. I must say that I had rather pa.s.s my evenings as we do,--some writing, some reading, then a quiet game, and then at my desk again,--than to take the chances of society, in town or country. If I can get you to think as I do, we shall pa.s.s a happy life here. Heaven grant that I may not fall into a life of pain! With our good spirits, as they now are, we every day fall into a quant.i.ty of dramatic capers that are enough to make a cat laugh,--no bigger animal.

Hoping you may have as much folly, for what saith Paley? "He that is not a fool sometimes, is always one,"--and wis.h.i.+ng you all merry, I am as ever,

Your loving father,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

[307] Nothing can be imagined more peaceful than the retirement of Sheffield. Removed from the main lines of traffic and travel, even now that a railroad pa.s.ses through it, the village remains, as it has been for a hundred and fifty years, the quiet centre of the quiet farms spread for four or five miles about it. The Housatonic wanders at its own sweet and lazy will among the meadows, turning and returning upon itself till it has loitered twenty miles in crossing the eight-mile towns.h.i.+p, but never turning a mill or offering encouragement to any industry but that of the muskrats who burrow in its banks, or the kingfishers who break its gla.s.sy surface in pursuit of their prey. No busy factories are there; no rattle of machinery or feverish activity of commerce disturbs the general placidity; and the still valley lies between its enclosing hills as if it were, indeed, that happy Abyssinian vale my father fancied it in his childhood.

The people share the calm of the landscape. Like many New England towns where neither water-power nor large capital offers opportunity for manufactures, and where farming brings but slow returns, the village has been gradually drained of the greater part of its active and enterprising younger population, and is chiefly occupied by retired and quiet persons who maintain a very gentle stir of social life, save for a month or two in summer, when the streets brighten with the influx of guests from abroad.

[308] It must have been very different seventy years ago. Instead of three slenderly attended churches, divided by infinitesimal differences of creed, and larger variations of government and discipline, all the people then were accustomed to meet in one well-filled church; and the minister, a life resident, swayed church and congregation with large and unquestioned rule. There were several doctors with their trains of students, and lawyers of county celebrity, each with young men studying under his direction; and all these made the nucleus of a society that was both gay and thoughtful, and that received a strong impulse to self-development from the isolated condition of a small village in those days. Railroads and telegraphs have changed all this, and scarcely a hamlet is now so lonely as not to feel the great tides of the world's life sweep daily through it, bringing polish and general information with them, but was.h.i.+ng away much of the racy individuality and concentrated mental action which formerly made the pith of its being.

Sheffield has gained in external beauty and refinement year by year, but, judging from tradition, has lost in intellectual force. There is more light reading and less hard reading, much more acquaintance with newspapers and magazines, and less knowledge of great poets, than in my father's youth; but his love for his birthplace remained unchanged, and his eyes and his heart drank repose from its peaceful and familiar beauty.