Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D Part 23

[309] To William Cullen Bryant, Esq.

ST. DAVID'S, Oct. 6, 1869.

DEAR BRYANT, THE BOUNTIFUL,--You are something like grapes yourself.

By the bye, it 's no matter what you call me; "my dear Doctor" is well enough, if you can't do better; only "my dear Sir" I do hate, between good old friends such as we are, as much as Walter Scott did. But, as I was saying, you are like grapes yourself,--fair, round, self-contained, hanging gracefully upon the life-vine, still full of sap; s.h.i.+ning under the covert of leaves, but more clearly seen, now that the frosts of age are descending, and causing them to fall away; while I am more like--but I have so poor an opinion of myself, that I won't tell you what. This is no affected self-depreciation. I can't learn to be old, but am as full of pa.s.sion, impatience, foolishness, blind reachings after wisdom, as ever. Instance: I am angry with the expressman because he did not bring the grapes to-day; angry with the telegraph because it did not bring a despatch to tell how a sick boy was, under nine hours. . . .

Here I am, Thursday morning, on a second sheet, waiting for the grapes.

What else, in the mean time, shall I entertain you with? The flood! It has been prodigious, the highest known for many years; water, water all around, from beside the road here to the opposite hill. It is curious to see men running like rats from the deluge, up to their knees in water, on returning from a common walk (fact, happened to the S--s), trying to drive home one way and could n't,--going round to a bridge and finding that swept away,--dams torn down and mills toppled over, and half the "sure and firm-set earth" turned into water-courses and flood-trash. . . .

[310] The afternoon train has arrived, and no grapes. Very angry.

The faithless express, you see, is a great plague to you as well as me; for not only does it not bring me the grapes, but is the cause of your having this long dawdling letter. Why don't you show up its iniquities?

What is a "Post" made and set up for, if not, among other things, to bear affiches testifying to the people of their wickedness? The express is the most slovenly agent and the most irresponsible tyrant in the country. What it brings is perhaps ruined by delay,--plants, for instance. No help. "Pay," it says to the station-master, "or we don't leave it." Oh, if I had the gift and grace to send articles to the "Post," from time to time, upon abuses!

Friday. No grapes. More angry.

Sat.u.r.day. No grapes. I 'm furious.

This last was the record of the afternoon; but in the evening, at half-past nine, they were sent down from the station,--and in remarkably good order, considering, and in quant.i.ty quite astonis.h.i.+ng. The basket seemed like the conjurer's hat, out of which comes a half-bushel of flowers, oranges; and what not. We are all very much obliged to you; and, judging from the appearance of the six heaped-up plates, I am sure, when we come to eat them, that every tooth will testify, if it does not speak.

To the Same.

ST. DAVID'S, Feb. 28, 1870.

MY DEAR BRYANT,--The volume has not come, but the kindness has, and I will acknowledge the one without [311] waiting for the other; especially as it is not a case where one feels it expedient to give thanks for a book before he has read it. We all know the quality of this, from pa.s.sages of the work printed in advance. It will be the translation into English of the Iliad, I think, though not professing to be learned in translations of Homer, still less in the original.

I read your preface in the "Post." Nothing could be better, unless it is your speech at the Williams dinner, which was better, and better than any occasional speech you have given, me judice.

Great changes are projected in Sheffield,--you will have to come and see them and us,--a widening of the village on the east, towards the meadow and pine knoll, and--what do you think?--a railroad to the top of Taghkonic! 'T is even so-proposed. An eastern company has bought the Egremont Hotel, and the land along the foot of the mountain down as far as Spurr's ( a mile), and they talk seriously of a railroad. So the Taghkonic is to be made a watering-place, if the thing is feasible, in quite another sense than that in which it has long sent its streams and cast its lonely shadows upon our valley.

We are having winter at last, and our ice-houses filled with the best of ice, and the prospect is fair for the wood-piles. The books you sent are turning to great account with us. In that and in every way I am obliged to you; and am, as ever,

Yours truly,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

[312] To Mrs. David Lane.

ST. DAVID'S, Dec. 20, 1870.

DEAR FRIEND,--I think I must take you into council,--not to sit upon the case, nor to get up a procession, nor to have the bells rung, if we win; but just to sympathize, so far as mid-life vigor can, with an aged couple, who have lived together half a century, and would much rather live it over again than not to have lived it at all; who have lived in that wonderful connection, which binds and blends two wills into one; who do not say that no differences or difficulties have disturbed them, an attainment beyond human reach,--but who have grown in the esteem and love of each other to this day (at least one of them has); one of whom finds his mate more beautiful than when he married her, though the other's condition, in that respect, does n't admit of more or less, being a condition of obstinate mediocrity; and who, both of them, look with mingled wonder and grat.i.tude to their approaching Golden Wedding Day.

So you can look upon us with pleasure, on the day after Christmas, and think of us as surrounded by all our children and grandchildren.

And that is all we shall make, except in our thoughts, of our great anniversary.

Adieu. I shall not descend in this letter to meaner themes, but with our love to you all, am ever,

Your friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

From a Note-Book.

April 13, 1871.

FATHER TAYLOR, of Boston, has just died,-a very remarkable person. He was a sailor, and more than [313] forty years ago he came from before the mast into the pulpit. He brought with him, I suppose, something of the roughness of his calling; for I remember hearing of his preaching in the neighborhood of New Bedford when I first went there, and of his inveighing against paid preachers as wretched hirelings, "rocked upon five feather-beds to h.e.l.l." This, I was told, was meant for me, as I had just been settled upon the highest salary ever paid in those parts.

In after years I became acquainted with him, and a very pleasant and cordial acquaintance it was. His preaching improved in every way as he went on; the pulpit proved the best of rhetorical schools for him, and he became one of the most powerful and impressive preachers in the country. He was one of nature's orators, and one of the rarest. It was said of him that he showed what Demosthenes meant by "action." The whole man, body and soul, was not only in action, but was an action concentrated into speech. His strongly built frame,--every limb, muscle, and fibre,--his whole being, spoke.

Waldo Emerson took me to his chapel the first time I ever heard him preach. As we went along, speaking of his pathos, he said, "You 'll have to guard yourself to keep from crying." So warned, I thought myself safe enough. But I was taken down at the very beginning of the service. The prayers of the congregation were asked by the family of a young man,--a sailor, who had been destroyed by a shark on the coast of Africa. In'

the prayer, the scene was touchingly depicted,--how the poor youth went down to bathe in the summer sea, thoughtless, unconscious of any danger, when he was seized by the terrible monster that lay in wait for him.

And then the preacher prayed that none of us, going [314]down into the summer sea of pleasure, might sink into the jaws of destruction that were opened beneath. I think the prayer left no dry eyes.

Father Taylor was a man of large, warm-hearted liberality. He was a Methodist; but no sect could hold him. He often came to our Unitarian meetings and spoke in them. In addressing one of our autumnal conventions in New York, I recollect his congratulating us on our freedom from all trammels of prescription, creed, and church order, and exhorting us to a corresponding wide and generous activity in the cause of religion. He was always ready with an ill.u.s.tration, and for his purpose used this: "We have just had a visit in Boston," he said, "from an Indian chief and some of his people. They were invited to the house of Mr. Abbot Lawrence. As Mr. Lawrence received them in his splendid parlor, the chief, looking around upon it, said, It is very good; it is beautiful; but I--I walk large; I go through the woods and hunting-grounds one day, and I rise up in the morning and go through them the next,--I walk large. "Brethren," said the speaker, "walk large."

Taylor's great heart was not chilled by bigotry; neither was it by theology, nor by philosophy. His prayer was the breathing of a child's heart to an infinitely loving father; it was strangely free and confiding. I remember being in one of the early morning prayer-meetings of an anniversary week in Boston, and Taylor was there. As I rose to offer a prayer, I spoke a few words upon the kind of approach which we might make to the Infinite Being. Something like this I said,--that as we were taught to believe that we were made in the image of G.o.d, and were his children, emanations from the Infinite Perfection, [315]partakers of the divine nature; as the Infinite One had sent forth a portion of His own nature to dwell in these forms of frail mortality and imperfection, and no darkness, no sorrow, nor erring of ours could reach to Him; might we not think,--G.o.d knows, I said, that I would be guilty of no irreverence or presumption,-but might we not think that with infinite consideration and pity he looks down upon us struggling with our load; upon our weakness and trouble, upon our penitence and aspiration?

As the congregation was retiring, and I was pa.s.sing in the aisle, I saw Father Taylor sitting by the pulpit, and he beckoned me aside. "Brother Dewey," he said, in his emphatic way, "did you ever know any one to say what you have been saying this morning?"-"Why," I replied, "does not every one say it?"--"No," he answered; "I have talked with a thousand ministers, and no one of them ever said that."

To William Cullen Bryant, Esq.

ST. DAVID'S, Sept. 12, 1871.

DEAR AND VENERABLE,--For it seems you grow old, and count the diminis.h.i.+ng days, as a bankrupt his parting ducats. I never heard you say anything of the sort before, and have only thought of you as growing richer in every way. I don't in any way; but though well, considering, I find myself losing strength and good condition every year. That is why I move about less and less, sticking closer to my own bed and board, furnace and chimney-nook,--shelf for shoes, and pegs for coat and trousers. [316] I am very glad to hear from you, and that you will come and see us on your way home. Don't slip by us. Don't be miserly about time. Odysseus took a long time for his wanderings; take a hint from the same, not to be in a hurry.

To Mrs. David Lane.

ST. DAVID'S, Nov. 25, 1871.

DEAR me! and dear you, yet more. If I should write to you "often," what would be the condition of us both? I very empty, and you with a great clatter in your ears. Think of a hopper, with very little grain in it, to keep shaking! It would be a very impolitic hopper.

I am laughing at myself, while I write this, for I am not an empty hopper, and if I could "find it in my heart to bestow all my tediousness upon you," you would laugh at me too. Ay, but in what sense would you laugh? That is the question. I laugh at myself, proudly, for calling myself empty; and you, perhaps, would laugh at me piteously, on finding me so.

But a truce with this nonsense. Anybody will find enough to write who will write out what is within him. Did you ever read much of German letters,--those, for instance, of Perthes and his friends? They are full of religion, as our American letters, I think, are not. We seem to have been educated, especially we Unitarians, to great reserve on this subject. I remember Channing's preaching against so much reserve. It is partly, I believe, a reaction against profession. But there is another reason; and that is, in religion's having become, under a more rational culture, so a part of our whole life and thought [317] and being, that formally to express our feelings upon it seems to us unnecessary, and in bad taste, as if we were to say how much we love knowledge or literature, or how much we love our friends or our children. Much talk of this sort seems to bring a doubt, by implication, upon the very thing talked about. Channing talked perpetually about religion,--that is, everything ran into that,--but never about his own religious feelings.

Do get the life of Perthes, if you have never read it. That and "Palissy the Potter" are among the most interesting biographies I know.

It is grim November weather up here, and I like it. Everything in its place; and we are having considerable rain, which is more in place, as winter is approaching, than anything else could be. Wife and I are bunged up with colds. No, I am; that ugly epithet can't attach to the grace and delicacy of her conditions and proportions. But alas! I am losing my old and boasted security against colds. I but went out one evening, to give a lecture at the Friendly Union [The Sheffield Friendly Union is the name of an a.s.sociation for purposes of social entertainment and culture, which meets one evening in the week, during winter, at a hall in the village, to enjoy music, lectures, reading, dramas, or whatever diversion its managers can procure or its members offer.

Dancing and cards are forbidden, but other games are played in the latter part of the evening; and there is a small but good library, slowly enlarging, and much used and valued by the members. The subscription fee is small, and the meetings are seldom of less than one hundred or two hundred people, many coming three or four miles. The society was started in 1871, and Dr. Dewey took a great interest in it from the first. It was he who chose its name; and while his health lasted, he was a frequent attendant, and always lectured or read a play of Shakespeare before it two or three times every winter.] and this is the way I [318]pay for it. If there is any barrel in town bigger than my head, I should like to buy it, and get in.

I was sorry not to see Coquerel, and pleased to hear that he had the grace to be disappointed at not seeing me. But I don't seek people any more. Why, I don't think I should run in the mud to see Alexis I himself. And to a New York lady I suppose that is about the strongest thing I could say.

All send their love to you and yours.

Yours ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To the Same.