Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D Part 5

To the Same.

NEW BEDFORD, Feb. 14, 1824.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I cannot repress the inclination to offer you my sympathy. I have often thought with [FN: Mrs. Ware died in the interval between those two letters she was the daughter of Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, of Cambridge, Ma.s.s. In 1827 Mr. Ware was again married to Miss Mary Lovell Pickard.] [139] pain of what was coming upon you; and I fear, though long threatening, it has come at last with a weight which you could hardly have antic.i.p.ated. May G.o.d sustain and comfort you!

You are supported, I well know, while you are afflicted, in every recollection of what you lave lost. Surely the greatness of your trial argues the Kindness of Heaven, for it proves the greatness of the blessing you have enjoyed.

But, my dear sir, I will not urge upon you words which are but words, and touch not the terrible reality that occupies your mind. You want not the poor and old sayings of one who knows not--who cannot know--what you suffer. You need not the aids of reflection from me. But you need what, in common with your hands, I would invoke for you,--the aid, the consolation that is divine. G.o.d grant it to you,--all that affection can ask,--all that affliction can need,--prays

Your friend and brother,

O. DEWEY.

To Dr. Channing.

NEW BEDFORD, Oct. 16, 1827.

MY DEAR AND REVERED FRIEND,--Excuse me for calling you so; may the formalities and the English reserves excuse me too.

I have had two letters from New York, one from Mr. Sewall, and the other from Mr. Ware, which are so pressing as really to give me some trouble.

Do say something to me on this subject, if you have anything to say.

There certainly are many reasons, and strong as numerous, why I should not at present leave New Bedford,-why I should not take such a post. I cannot say I am made to doubt what I ought to do; but I have a fear lest [140] I should not do right, lest I should love my ease too well, lest it should be said to me in the other world, "A great opportunity, a glorious field was opened to you, and you did not improve it,"--lest, in other words, I should not act upon considerations sufficiently high, comprehensive, and disinterested,--fit, in short, for contemplation from the future world as well as from the present.

I do not write asking you to reply; for I do not suppose you have anything to say which you would not have suggested when I was with you.

Indeed, I believe I write, as much as for anything, because I want to communicate with you about something, and this is uppermost in my mind.

Present my affectionate regards to Mrs. Channing and the children, and to Miss Gibbs.

Yours most affectionately,

O. DEWEY. To Rev. Henry Ware.

NEW BEDFORD, March 29, 1829.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I cannot let you go off without my blessing. I did not know of your purpose till last evening, or I should not have left myself to write to you in the haste of a few minutes s.n.a.t.c.hed on Sunday evening, to say nothing of the aching nerves' and the misled hand that usually come along with it. By the by, I have a good mind to desire you to propose a year's exchange [for me] to somebody in England. If you meet with a man who is neither too good nor too bad, suppose you suggest it to him,--not as from me, however.

I should think that a man, in going to England, would feel the evil of belonging to a sect, unless that sect [141] embraced all the good and wise and gifted,--which can be said of no sect. The sectarianism of sects, however, is the bad thing. These are necessary; that is not necessary, but to human weakness. But fie upon discoursing to a man who is just stepping on s.h.i.+pboard! May it bear you safely! May it tread the mountain wave "as a steed that knows its rider," and is conscious of what it bears from us! My heart will go with you in a double sense; for I want to see England,--I want to see Italy, and the Alps, and the south of France. I don't know whether you intend to do all this; and I am very certain not to do any of it. I know that yours will not be a travelled heart, any more than Goldsmith's. Let me lay in my claim for as many of its kind thoughts as belong to me. But yet more, let me a.s.sure you, as the exigency demands, that for every one you have thus to render, I have five to give in return.

I believe you will not be sorry, at this time, that my lines and words are few and far between; for your leisure cannot serve to read many.

Mrs. D. desires her best wishes to you. We do not know whether Mrs. Ware goes with you, but hope she does.

I took my pen feeling as if I had not a word to say, but--G.o.d bless you!

and that I say with all my heart. Write me from abroad if you can, but make no exertion to do so.

Yours as ever,

O. DEWEY.

To the Same.

NEW BEDFORD, Sep. 14, 1830,

DEAR WARE,--I write down the good old compellation here, not because I have anything in particular to say [142] to you, but just to a.s.sure myself in the agreeable conviction that you are again within sixty miles of me. When you get a little quiet, when matters have taken some form with you, when you have seen some hundreds of people, and answered some thousands of questions, then take your pen for the s.p.a.ce of ten minutes, and tell me of your "whereabouts," and how your strength and spirits hold out, and what is the prospect.

I hope you will not disappoint me of the visit this autumn, for I want to talk the sun down and the stars up with you. I suppose you have tales enough for "a thousand and one nights." You have made friends here, moreover, even in Rome,--some by hearsay, and others who will be here probably in a fortnight or three weeks. Kind Mrs. Ware has admirers here. Think of that, sir! That while Mr. W. is spoken of only with a kind of reverence, the lady carries off all the charms and fascinations of epithet. But alas! Such is the hard fate of us of the wiser s.e.x.

There are other senses than Saint Paul's in which we may say, "Where I am weak, there am I strong."

Pray excuse the levity (specific) of this letter, on two rounds,--first, that I am very heavy, and should sink in any other vessel; and, secondly, that I cannot take in any of the weighty matters, because I have no room for them.

Mrs. Dewey joins me in the regards to you and Mrs. Ware, with which I am,

Most truly yours,

O. DEWEY.

In less than three years from this time the nervous suffering from overwork became so intense that Mr. Dewey was advised to go abroad [143]

to obtain the absolute rest from labor that was impossible here.

To Miss Catherine M. Sedgwick.

SHEFFIELD, May 2, 1833.

My DEAR FRIEND,--I am about to go abroad. I have made up my mind to that huge, half pleasurable, half painful undertaking; or shall I say, rather, that both the pleasure and the pain come by wholes, and not by halves? The latter I feel as a domestic man, for I must go alone; the former I feel as a civilized man. Civilized, I say, for who that has the lowest measure of educated intelligence and sensibility can expect to tread all the cla.s.sic lands of the world, Greece only excepted, without a thrill of delight?

If you should think that I had written thus much as claiming your sympathy in what so much interests me, and if you should think this without accusing me of presumption, I should be tempted, were I a.s.sured of the fact, to stop here, and to leave the matter on a footing so gratifying to my feelings. But I must not venture to take so considerable a risk, and must therefore hasten to tell you that what I have said is only a vestibule to something further.

Nor is the vestibule at all too large or imposing for the object, as I conceive it, to which it is to open the way; for I am about to ask through you, if you will consent and condescend to be the medium, a very considerable favor of a very distinguished man. Among many letters of introduction which I have received, it so happens, as they say in Parliament, that I can obtain none to certain persons that I want to see quite as much as any others [144] in Europe. None of our Boston gentlemen that I can find are acquainted with Professor Wilson, or Miss Ferrier, the author of "Inheritance," or Thomas Moore, or Campbell, or Bulwer. The "Noctes Ambrosianx," with other things, have made me a great admirer of Wilson; and Miss Ferriers (I don't know whether her name ends with s or not) I had rather see than any woman in Europe. She comes nearer to Sir Walter, I think, than any writer of fiction abroad, and in depth of religious sentiment goes very far beyond him. Now, I presume that Was.h.i.+ngton Irving is acquainted with all these individuals; and what I venture to ask is, whether, through your intervention, letters can be obtained from him to any of them, and especially to the two first.

Now I must make you comprehend how little I wish you to go out of your way, or to put any constraint on yourself in the matter. I have none of the pa.s.sion for seeing celebrated men, merely as such. Those whose writings have interested me, I do, of course, wish to see; but I am to be too hasty a traveller to make it a great object to see them, or to go very much out of my way for it. Above all, if you have the least reluctance to ask this of Mr. Irving, you must allow me to impose it as a condition of my request that you will not do it; or if Mr. Irving is reluctant to give the letters, do not undertake to tell me so with any circ.u.mlocution, for I understand all about the delicacy of these Transatlantic connections. I only fear that the very length of this letter will convey to you an undue impression of the importance which I give to the subject of it. Pray construe it not so, but set it down as one of the involuntary consequences of the pleasure I have in conversing with you.

Very truly your friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

[145] The letters, and every other advantage that the kindness of friends could provide, were given him, and the mingled antic.i.p.ations with which he entered on his year of solitary exile were all fulfilled.

His enjoyment in the wonders of nature and of art, in society, and in the charm of historical and romantic a.s.sociation which is the peculiar pleasure to an American of travel in the Old World, was very great, and the relief to his brain from the weekly pressure of original production gave him ease for the present and hope for the future. But the year was darkened for him by the death of his youngest sister, who had been married the previous summer to Mr. Andrew L. Russell, of Plymouth, and of his wife's brother, John Hay Farnham, of Indiana; and when he returned home, three months' work convinced him that arduous and prolonged mental labor was henceforth impossible for him. With deep disappointment and sorrow, he resigned his charge at New Bedford, and left the place and people which had been and always remained very dear to him.

Few are left of those who heard his first preaching there. One of his sisters says: "To me, brought up on the Orthodoxy of Berks.h.i.+re, it was like a revelation, and I think it was much the same to the Quakers.

Those views of life and human nature and its responsibilities that are common now, were new then, and the effect produced upon us all was most thrilling and solemn; and [146] when, service over, we pa.s.sed out of the church, I remember there were very few words spoken,-a contrast to the custom nowadays of chatting and laughing at the door." I have heard others speak of the overwhelming pathos of his manner, and I asked the Rev. Dr. Morison, who came to New Bedford as a young man during the last years of our stay there, to put some of his personal remembrances on paper. In a note from him, dated Toth January, 1883, he says: "I have not forgotten my promise to send you some little account of your father's preaching in New Bedford. He was so great a man, uttering himself in his preaching, the sources of his power lay so deep, his words came to us so vitally connected with the most subtle and effective forces of the moral and spiritual universe, that I can no more describe him than I could a June day, in all its glory and beauty and its boundless resources of joy and life, to one who had never known it."

The following pages, which Dr. Morison was nevertheless kind enough to send, have touching value and beauty:

"More than half a century ago, in March, 1832, I went to New Bedford, and, for nearly a year, was a constant attendant at Mr. Dewey's church.

During that year he preached most of the sermons contained in the first volume that he published. As we read them, they are among the ablest and most impressive sermons in the language. But when read now they give only a slight idea of what they were as they came to us then, all [147]

glowing and alive with the emotions of the preacher. When he walked through the church to the pulpit, his head swaying backward and forward as if too heavily freighted, his whole bearing was that of one weighed down by the thoughts in which he was absorbed and the solemn message which he had come to deliver. The old prophetic 'burden of the Lord' had evidently been laid upon him. Some hymn marked by its depth of religious feeling was read. This was followed by a prayer, which was not the spontaneous, easy outflowing of calmly reverential feelings, but the labored utterance of a soul overawed and overburdened by emotions too strong for utterance. There was sometimes an appearance almost of distress in this exercise, so utterly inadequate, as it seemed to him, were any words of his to express what lay deepest in his mind, when thus brought face to face with G.o.d. 'I do not shrink,' he said, 'from speaking to man.' But, except in his rarest and best moments, he was oppressed by a sense of the poverty of any language of thanksgiving or supplication that he could use in his intercourse with G.o.d."

"His manner in preaching was marked by great depth and strength of feeling, but always subdued. He spoke on great subjects. He entered profoundly into them, and treated them with extraordinary intellectual ability and clearness. They who were seeking for light found it in his preaching. But more than any intellectual precision or clearness of thought was to be gained from him in his treatment of the momentous questions which present themselves, sooner or later, to every thoughtful mind. Behind these questions, more important than any one or all of them intellectually considered, was the realm of thought, emotion, aspiration, out of which [148] religious ideas are formed, and in which the highest faculties of our nature are to find their appropriate nourishment and exercise. He spoke to us as one who belonged to this higher world. The realm in which he lived, and which seemed never absent from his mind, impressed itself as he spoke, and gave a deeper solemnity and attractiveness to his words than could be given by any specific and clearly-defined ideas. A sense of mystery and awe pervaded his teachings, and infused into his utterances a sentiment of divine sacredness and authority. He preached as I never, before or since, have heard any one else, on human nature, on retribution, on the power of kindness, on life and death, in their relations to man and to what is divine. He stood before us compa.s.sed about by a religious atmosphere which penetrated his inmost nature, and gave its tone and coloring to all he said. For he spoke as one who saw rising visibly before him the issues of life and of death."

"He was gifted with a rare dramatic talent. But it was a gift, not an art, and showed itself in voice and gesture as by the natural impulse of a great nature profoundly moved, and in its extremest manifestations so subdued as to leave the impression of a vast underlying reserved force.