Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D Part 8

NEW YORK, Sept. 30, 1841.

MY DEAR SIR,--I cannot go away for two years without taking leave of you. I wish I could do so by going to see you. But my decision to go is not more than three weeks old, and the intervening time has been overwhelmed with cares. Among other things, I have been occupied with printing a volume of sermons. I feel as if it were a foolish thing to confess, but I imagined that I had something to say about "human life"

(that is my subject), though I warrant you will find it little enough.

But then, you are accustomed to say so much better things than the rest of us, that you ought to distrust your judgment.

I sail for Havre on the 8th October with my family.

I am extremely glad to learn from Mrs. G. that your health is so good, and that you pa.s.s some time every day with your pen in hand. The world, I believe, is to want for its guidance more powerful writing, during twenty years to come, than it has ever wanted before, or will again, and I hope you will be able to do your part. Perhaps this is speaking more oracularly than becomes my ignorance; but it does appear to me that the civilized world is on the eve of a change and a progress, putting all past data at fault, and outstripping all present imagination. What questions are to arise and to be [168] hotly agitated about human rights, social position, lawful government, and the laws that are to press man down or to help him up? What Brownsons and Lamennais' and Strauss' are to come upon the stage, and to be confronted with sober and earnest reasoning?

But I did not think to put my slender finger into such great matters, but only to say adieu! If you would write me while abroad, you know it would give me great pleasure.

With my most kind and affectionate regards to Mrs. Channing, and my very heart's good wishes and felicitations to M., I am as ever,

Very truly your friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To Rev. William Ware.

PARIS, Dec. 25, 1841.

MY DEAR FELLOW,--You see how I begin; truth is, I feel more like writing a love-letter to you than a letter about affairs, or matters, or things; for have you not been my fellow more than anybody else has been? Have we not lived and labored together, have I not been in your house as if it were my own, and have you not come into my study many a time and oft, as little disturbing my thought, and seeming as much to belong there, as any sunbeam that glided into it? And furthermore, is not this anniversary time not only a fellows.h.i.+p season for all Christian souls, but especially a reminder to those who have walked to the house of G.o.d in company?

Still, however, it is of affairs that I have felt pressed to write you ever since I left home,--indeed, ever since I received your letter from Montreal. I have felt [169] that I ought at least to tell you that I see no prospect of doing anything that you desire of me. When I shall be able to address myself to any considerable task again, I know not.

At present I am lying quite perdu. I have lost all faculty, but to read French histories, memoirs, novels, periodicals, etc., and to run after this great show-world of Paris,--Louvre, gallery, opera, what not. I am longing to get behind these visible curtains, and to know the spirit, character, manner of being, of this French people. At present all is problem to me. No Sunday, literally no cessation of labor, no sanct.i.ty of domestic ties with mult.i.tudes, no honesty or truth (it is commonly reported), but courtesy, kindness, it seems, and a sort of conventional fidelity,--for instance, no stealing; a million of people here, but without either manufactures or commerce on a great scale; pet.i.t manufacture, pet.i.t trade, pet.i.t menage, pet.i.t prudence unexampled, and the grandest tableaux of royal magnificence in public works and public grounds to be seen in the world; the rez-au-chaussee (ground floor) of Paris, a shop; all the stories above, to be let; a million of people, and n.o.body at home, in our American sense of the word; an infinite boutiquerie, an infinite bonbonnerie, an infinite stir and movement, and no deep moral impulse that I can see; a strange melange of the most shallow levity in society, the most atrocious license in literature, and the most savage liberalism in politics,--on the whole, what sort of people is it?

He bien!-to come down from my high horse before I break my neck,--here we are, at honest housekeeping; for we hope to pay the bills. Hope to pay, did I say? We pay as we go; that is the only way here; no stores, no larder, no bins, no garners,--the shops of [170] Paris are all this to every family. Our greatest good-fortune here is in having the Walshes for our next-door neighbors; and who should I find in Mrs. W.

but a very loving cousin and hearty admirer of yours? She wishes to write a P. S. in my letter, and I am so happy to come to you in such good company, as well as to enhance the value of my letter with something better than I can write, that I very gladly give the s.p.a.ce to her. I am only sorry and ashamed that it is so little. And so, with all our love to you all,

I am as ever yours,

ORVILLE DEWEY. To the Same.

CHAMPEL, NEAR GENEVA, July 18, 1842.

MY DEAR FELLOW AND FRIEND,--At the hour of midnight, with the moon s.h.i.+ning in at my open window, the sound of the rus.h.i.+ng Arve in my ears,--around me, a fine table of land a hundred feet above the stream that washes its base, and covered with a hundred n.o.ble chestnuts, and laid out with beautiful walks,--thus "being and situate," I take in hand this abominable steel pen to write you. Envy me not, William Ware! Let no man, that is well, envy him that is sick. If I were "lying and being and situate," as the deeds have it, and as I ought to have it, I should think myself an object of envy, that is, supposing I thought at all. No; in this charmed land, and in every land where I go, I bear a burden of diseased nerves which I might well exchange for the privilege of living on the Isle of Shoals, could I but have the const.i.tution of some of its pechereux (by contraction, pesky) inhabitants.

. . . There has come a new day, and I have got a new [171] pen. Last night I was too much awake; I got up from my bed and wrote in my dressing-gown; to-day I am too much asleep. But allons, and see what will come of it.

This morning we walked into Geneva to church, the air so clear that it seemed as if we could count every tile on the houses. The chimneys are crowned with a forest of tin pipes, twisted in every direction to carry off smoke. At dusky eve, in a superst.i.tious time, a man, coming suddenly upon the town, might think that an army of goblins had just alighted upon its roofs. . . . What stupendous things do ages acc.u.mulate upon every spot where they have pa.s.sed! Every time we go into town we pa.s.s by the very place where Servetus was burned. And Geneva is old enough to have seen Julius Caesar!

. . . Here's another new day, William; and I wish I were a new man. But the heavens are bright, and the air so clear that I can define every man's patch of vineyard and farm on the Jura, ten miles off; every fissure and seam on Saleve, two miles back of us; and through a gap in the Saleve, I do not doubt, were I to go out on the grounds, I could see the top of Mont Blanc. And yet lay one or two ounces' weight on a man's brain, and a tackle, standing on the Jura, Saleve, and Mont Blanc together, can't lift him up. You see, I am resolved you shan't envy me. However, not to be too lugubrious, I am improving; that is, the paroxysms of this trouble are less severe, though I am far from being relieved of the burden.

But it is time I turn to your letter, which I received here with Henry's, on the 12th June. Thank him, for I cannot write you both now.

Much news he gave me; [172] but how much that was distressing, and that concerning himself most of all. What is to become of our churches? And what is he to do? It relieves me very much to hear that Gannett's case is no worse. My love and sympathy to him when you see him. Is he not one of our n.o.blest and most disinterested, as well as ablest men,--nay, as an extemporaneous speaker, unrivalled among us? . . .

To Miss Catherine M. Sedgwick.

CHAMPEL, NEAR GENEVA, July 13, 1842.

MY DEAR FRIEND,-The public prints have doubtless relieved me from what I should consider a most painful duty,--that of announcing to you the death of your friend Sismondi! He died on the 25th of last month. I saw Mme. Sismondi yesterday, and she desired me to tell you particularly that she must defer writing to you some little time; that she did not feel that she could write now, especially in a way to give you any comfort. She thought it was better that I should announce it to you, not seeming to be aware that the death of her husband is one of the events that the newspapers soon carry through the world. Indeed, the modesty of Sismondi and his wife is one of the things in them that has most struck me. Mme. S. said yesterday, in speaking of the commencement of your friends.h.i.+p, that "Sismondi was so grateful to her for finding him out."

And Sismondi, when I saw him on my arrival, in expressing to me his regret and concern that it was so long since he had heard from you, said he knew that you had many letters to write, etc.; as if that could be the reason why you did not write to him! Well, there is more modesty in the world than we think, I verily believe. [173]. . . Speaking of her husband, Mme. S. said: "Of his acquisitions and powers, I say nothing; but it was such a heart,--there never was such a heart!"

I ought to add, while speaking of Mme. S., since we owe it all to you, that her reception of us was the kindest possible. She brought us all, children and all, to her house immediately to pa.s.s an evening, and indeed took all our hearts by storm,--if that can be said of a creature so gentle and modest. . . .

I wrote the foregoing this morning. At dinner-time your letter of June 12 came, which, with several others, has so turned my head, that I don't know whether it is morning or afternoon. We are conscious, "at each remove," of dragging "the lengthening chain," but we do not know exactly how heavy or how strong it is, till some one lays a hand on the other end. The lightest pressure there!--you know how it is when some one steps on the end of a long string which a boy draws after him. G.o.d bless you!--it was in my heart to say no less,--for thinking it is a long time. . . . We read and walk and talk and laugh, and sometimes sigh.

Switzerland has no remedy against that. Of myself I have nothing to say that is worth the saying. I am improving somewhat, but I am suffering much and almost continually, and as yet I recover no energy for work.

To Rev. Henry W Bellows.

FLORENCE, ITALY, Nov. 24, 1842.

. . . It is now a fortnight or more since the overwhelming news came to us of the death of Channing. During this time my mind has been pa.s.sing through steps of gradual approximation to the reality, but never did it [174] find, or else voluntarily interpose, so many barriers between itself and reality as in this most deplorable event. There are losses which I should more acutely feel than the loss of Channing; because friends.h.i.+p with him lacked, I imagine, in all who enjoyed it, those little familiarities, those fonder leanings, which leave us, as it were, bewildered and utterly prostrate when the beloved object is gone. But there is here a sense of general and irreparable loss, such as the people of a realm might be supposed to feel when its cherished head is suddenly taken away. For I suppose that no person sustained so many and such vital relations to the whole republic of thought, to the whole realm of moral feeling among us, as this, our venerated teacher and friend. To call him "that great and good man," does not meet the feeling we have about him. Familiar to almost n.o.body, he was near to everybody.

His very personality seems to have been half lost in the sense of general benefit. He was one of those great gifts of G.o.d, like sunlight or the beauty of nature, which we scarcely know how to live without, or in the loss of which, at least, life is sadly changed, and the world itself is mournfully bereft.

But a letter affords no scope for such a theme; and besides, painful as it is to pa.s.s to common topics, they claim their dues. Life, ay, common life, must go on as it ever did, and nothing shall tear that infinite web of mystery in which it walks enveloped. Ours, however, in these days, is rather a shaded life. Absence from home, a strange land, a land, too, that sits in mourning over the great relics of the past,--all this tends to make it so. More material still is what pa.s.ses within the microcosm, and I am not yet well. Not that I am worse, for I am continually better. But--but, in short, not to [175] speak too gravely, if a man feels as if one of the snakes of Medusa's head were certainly in his brain,--I have seen a horrible picture of the Medusa to-day by Leonardo da Vinci,--he cannot be very happy, you know. And if those around him be of such as "bear one another's burdens," then you see how the general conscience follows.

But let me not make the picture too dark, for the sake of truth and grat.i.tude. Pleasantly situated we are, in his fair Florence, which grows fairer to my eye the more I see it. Our rooms look to the south, and down from a balcony upon a garden full of orange-trees, and roses End chrysanthemums in full bloom. . . . Then we have reading and music in-doors, and churches and palaces and galleries out-doors. And such galleries they grow upon me daily; the more ordinary paintings, or those hat seemed such at first, reveal something new on very new perusal. It is great reading with such walls or pages. Still there is a longing, almost a sick pining, or home at times. . .

To Rev. William Ware.

NEW YORK, Sept. 26, 1843.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Why have I not written to you, before? Every day for the last three weeks I have thought of it. I have been with you in thought, and with him, your dear brother,--my dear friend! If he should have known me and conversed with me, I could lot have refrained from making the journey to see him. How easy his converse ever was, how natural, how sensible [176] and humorous by turns, but especially so unforced that for me it always had a charm by itself. The words seemed to drop from our lips almost without our will, and yet with n.o.body could I get through so much conversation in so little time. Neither of us seemed to want much explanation from the other; I think we understood one another well.

Where is he now? With whom talks he now? Perhaps with Channing and Greenwood! Oh! are not the best of us gone; and all in one year! Was there ever such a year?

My dear William Ware, we must hold on to the ties of life as we may, and especially to such as unite you and me. But are you not getting a strange feeling of nonchalance about everything,--life, death, and the time of death, what matters it? I rather think it is natural for the love of life to grow stronger as we advance in life and yet it is so terribly shaken by the experience of life, and one is so burdened at times by the all-surrounding and overwhelming mystery and darkness, that one is willing to escape any way and on any terms.

I have your few kind words. I hope I shall have such oftener than once or twice a year. I will try to take care of myself, and to live. . . .

To the Same.

NEW YORK, Oct. 17, 1844.

MY DEAR WARE,--I ought not--I must not--I cannot--I dare not,--at least not at present. When the present stress is over. I may feel better. The fact is, at present I am scarcely fit to take care of my parish, and it would be madness to take upon myself any new [177] burden. See there a fine fellow I should be to have charge of the "Examiner," who have written present three times in as many lines! However, I am writing now in terrible haste, on the spur of an instant determination; for I must and will put this thing off from my mind. I have kept it there for a fortnight. I have wished to do this. First, because you wished it; secondly, because others wish it; and, thirdly, I had a leaning to it.

In case of a colleagues.h.i.+p, and that must come, I might be glad of it.

Bellows, too, would help me,--would take charge with me,--and that may be, if the thing is open by and by, but not now; I must not think of it any more now. I have not slept a wink all night for thinking of this and other things.

All this, my dear fellow, is somewhat confidential. I do not wish to be considered a good-for-nothing. Perhaps I shall rally. I was doing very well when I left the Continent. England overwhelmed me with engagements, and so it is here. With our love to your love and the children,

Yours as ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To the Same.

NEW YORK, Jan. 6, 1845.