Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D.

by Orville Dewey.

INTRODUCTORY.

IT is about twenty-five years since, at my earnest desire, my father began to write some of the memories of his own life, of the friends whom he loved, and of the noteworthy people he had known; and it is by the help of these autobiographical papers, and of selections from his letters, that I am enabled to attempt a memoir of him. I should like to remind the elder generation and inform the younger of some things in the life of a man who was once a foremost figure in the world from which he had been so long withdrawn that his death was hardly felt beyond the circle of his personal friends. It was like the fall of an aged tree in the vast forests of his native hills, when the deep thunder of the crash is heard afar, and a new opening is made towards heaven for those who stand near, but when to the general eye there is no change in the rich woodland that clothes the mountain side.

But forty years ago, when his church in New York was crowded morning and evening, and [8] eager mult.i.tudes hung upon his lips for the very bread of life, and when he entered also with spirit and power into the social, philanthropic, and artistic life of that great city; or nearly sixty years ago, when he carried to the beautiful town and exquisite society of New Bedford an influx of spiritual life and a depth of religious thought which worked like new yeast in the well-prepared Quaker mind,--then, had he been taken away, men would have felt that a tower of strength had fallen, and those especially, who in his parish visits had felt the sustaining comfort of his singular tenderness and sympathy in affliction, and of his counsel in distress, would have mourned for him not only as for a brother, but also a chief. Now, almost all of his own generation have pa.s.sed away. Here and there one remains, to listen with interest to a fresh account of persons and things once familiar; while the story will find its chief audience among those who remember Mr.

Dewey [FN My father always preferred this simple t.i.tle to the more formal "Dr." and in his own family and among his most intimate friends he was Mr. Dewey to the last. He was, of course, gratified by the complimentary intention of Harvard University in bestowing the degree of D.D. upon him in 1839, but he never felt that his acquisitions in learning ent.i.tled him to it.] as among the lights of their own youth.

Those also who love the study of [9] human nature may follow with pleasure the development of a New England boy, with a character of great strength, simplicity, reverence, and honesty, with scanty opportunities for culture, and heavily handicapped in his earlier running by both poverty and Calvinism, but possessed from the first by the love of truth and knowledge, and by a generous sympathy which made him long to impart whatever treasures he obtained. To trace the growth of such a life to a high point of usefulness and power, to see it unspoiled by honor and admiration, and to watch its retirement, under the pressure of nervous disease, from active service, while never losing its concern for the public good, its quickness of personal sympathy, nor its interest in the solution of the mightiest problems of humanity, cannot be an altogether unprofitable use of time to the reader, while to the writer it is a work of consecration. He who was at once like a son and brother to my father, he who should have crowned a forty-years' friendship by the fulfilment of this pious task, and who would have done it with a stronger and a steadier hand than mine, BELLOWS, was called first from that "fair companionship," while still in the unbroken exercise of the varied and remarkable powers which made his life one of such [10] large use, blessing, and pleasure to the world. None could make his place good to his elder friend, whose approaching death was visibly hastened by grief for the loss of the constant sympathy and devotion which had faithfully cheered his declining years. Many and beautiful tributes were laid upon my father's tomb by those whom he left here. Why should we not hope that that of Bellows was in the form of greeting?

ST. DAVID'S, July, 1883.

[11]I WAS born in Sheffield, Ma.s.s., on the 28th of March, 1794. My grandparents, Stephen Dewey and Aaron Root, were among the early settlers of the town, and the houses they built the one of brick, and the other of wood--still stand. They came from Westfield, about forty miles distant from Sheffield, on horseback, through the woods; there were no roads then. We have always had a tradition in our family that the male branch is of Welsh origin. When I visited Wales in 1832, I remember being struck with the resemblance I saw in the girls and young women about me to my sisters, and I mentioned it when writing home. On going up to London, I became acquainted with a gentleman, who, writing a note one day to a friend of mine and speaking of me, said: "I spell the name after the Welsh fashion, Devi; I don't know how he spells it." On inquiring of this gentleman, and he referred me also to biographical dictionaries,--I found that our name had an origin of unsuspected dignity, not to say sanct.i.ty, being no other than that of Saint David, the patron saint [12] of Wales, which is shortened and changed in the speech of the common people into Dewi.'

Everyone tries, I suppose, to penetrate as far back as he can into his childhood, back towards his infancy, towards that mysterious and shadowy line behind which lies his unremembered existence. Besides the usual life of a child in the country,--running foot-races with my brother Chandler, building brick ovens to bake apples in the side-hill opposite the house, and the steeds of willow sticks cut there, and beyond the unvarying gentleness of my mother and the peremptory decision and playfulness at the same time of my father,--his slightest word was enough to hush the wildest tumult among us children, and yet he was usually gay and humorous in his family,--besides and beyond this, I remember nothing till the first event in my early childhood, and that was acting in a play. It was performed in the church, as part of a school exhibition. The stage was laid upon the pews, and the audience seated in the gallery. I must have been about five years old then, and I acted the part of a little son. I remember feeling, then and afterwards, very queer and shamefaced about my histrionic papa and mamma. It is striking to observe, not only how early, but how powerfully, imagination [13] is developed in our childhood. For some time after, I regarded those imaginary parents as sustaining a peculiar relation, not only to me, but to one another; I thought they were in love, if not to be married. But they never were married, nor ever thought of it, I suppose.

All that drama was wrought out in the bosom of a child. It is worth noticing, too, the freedom with sacred things, of those days, approaching to the old fetes and mysteries in the church. We are apt to think of the Puritan times as all rigor and strictness. And yet here, nearly sixty years ago, was a play acted in the meeting-house: the church turned into a theatre. And I remember my mother's telling me that when she was a girl her father carried her on a pillion to the raising of a church in Pittsfield; and the occasion was celebrated by a ball in the evening. Now, all dancing is proscribed by the church there as a sinful amus.e.m.e.nt.

[FN This was the reason why Mr. Dewey gave to the country home which he inherited from his father the name of "St. David's," by which it is known to his family and friends.--M. E. D.]

The next thing that I remember, as an event in my childhood, was the funeral of General Ashley, one of our townsmen, who had served as colonel, I think, in the War of the Revolution. I was then in my sixth year. It was a military funeral; and the procession, for a long distance, filled the wide street. The music, the solemn march, the bier borne in the midst, the crowd! It seemed to me as if the whole world was at a funeral. The remains of Bonaparte borne to the Invalides amidst the crowds of Paris could not, [14] I suppose, at a later day, have affected me like that spectacle. I do not certainly know whether I heard the sermon on the occasion by the pastor, the Rev. Ephraim Judson; but at any rate it was so represented to me that it always seems as if I had heard it, especially the apostrophe to the remains that rested beneath that dark pall in the aisle. "General Ashley!" he said, and repeated, "General Ashley!--he hears not."

To the recollections of my childhood this old pastor presents a very distinct, and I may say somewhat portentous, figure, tall, large-limbed, pale, ghostly almost, with slow movement and hollow tone, with eyes dreamy, and kindly, I believe, but spectral to me, coming into the house with a heavy, deliberate, and solemn step, making me feel as if the very chairs and tables were conscious of his presence and did him reverence; and when he stretched out his long, bony arm and said, "Come here, child!" I felt something as if a spiritualized ogre had invited me.

Nevertheless, he was a man, I believe, of a very affectionate and tender nature; indeed, I afterwards came to think so; but at that time, and up to the age of twelve, it is a strict truth that I did not regard Mr.

Judson as properly a human being,--as a man at all. If he had descended from the planet Jupiter, he could not have been a bit more preternatural and strange to me. Indeed, I well remember the occasion when the idea of his proper humanity first flashed upon [15] my mind. It was when I saw him, one day, beat the old black horse he always rode, apparently in a pa.s.sion like any other man. The old black horse--large, fat, heavy, lazy--figures in my mind almost as distinctly as its master; and if, as it came down the street, its head were turned aside towards the school-house, as indicating the rider's intent to visit us, I remember that the school was thrown into as much commotion as if an armed spectre were coming down the road. Our awe of him was extreme; yet he loved to be pleasant with us. He would say,--examining the school was always a part of his object, "How much is five times seven?" "Thirty-five," was the ready answer. "Well," replied the old man, "saying so don't make it so"; a very significant challenge, which we were ill able to meet. At the close of his visit he always gave an exact and minute account of the Crucifixion,--I think always, and in the same terms. It was a mere appeal to physical sympathy, awful, but not winning. When he stood before us, and, lifting his hands almost to the ceiling, said, "And so they reared him up!" it seemed as if he described the catastrophe of the world, not its redemption. Indeed, Mr. Judson appeared to think that anything drawn from the Bible was good, whether he made any moral application of it or not. I have heard him preach a whole sermon, giving the most precise and detailed description of the building of the Tabernacle, without one word of comment, [16] inference, or instruction.

But he was a good and kindly man; and when, as I was going to college at the age of eighteen, he laid his hand upon my head, and gave me, with solemn form and tender accent, his blessing, I felt awed and impressed, as I imagine the Hebrew youth may have felt under a patriarch's benediction.

With such an example and teacher of religion before me, whose goodness I did not know, and whose strangeness and preternatural character only I felt; and indeed with all the ideas I got of religion, whether from Sunday-keeping or catechising, my early impressions on that subject could not be happy or winning. I remember the time when I really feared that if I went out into the fields to walk on Sunday, bears would come down from the mountain and catch me. At a later day, but still in my childhood, I recollect a book-pedler's coming to our house, and when he opened his pack, that I selected from a pile of story-books, Bunyan's "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners." Religion had a sort of horrible attraction for me, but nothing could exceed its gloominess. I remember looking down from the gallery at church upon the celebration of the Lord's Supper, and pitying the persons engaged in it more than any people in the world,--I thought they were so unhappy. I had heard of "the unpardonable sin," and well do I recollect lying in my bed a mere child--and having thoughts and words injected into my mind, which I [17]imagined were that sin, and shuddering, and trembling, and saying aloud, "No, no, no; I do not,--I will not." It is the grand mystery of Providence that what is divinest and most beautiful should be suffered to be so painfully, and, as it must seem at first view, so injuriously misconstrued. But what is universal, must be a law; and what is law, must be right,--must have good reasons for it. And certainly so it is.

Varying as the ages vary, yet the experience of the individual is but a picture of the universal mind,--of the world's mind. The steps are the same, ignorance, fear, superst.i.tion, implicit faith; then doubt, questioning, struggling, long and anxious reasoning; then, at the end, light, more or less, as the case may be. Can it, in the nature of things, be otherwise? The fear of death, for instance, which I had, which all children have, can childhood escape it? Far onward and upward must be the victory over that fear. And the fear of G.o.d, and, indeed, the whole idea of religion,--must it not, in like manner, necessarily be imperfect? And are imperfection and error peculiar to our religious conceptions? What mistaken ideas has the child of a man, of his parent when correcting him, or of some distinguished stranger! They are scarcely less erroneous than his ideas of G.o.d. What mistaken notions of life, of the world, the great, gay, garish world, all full of cloud-castles, ships laden with gold, pleasures endless and entrancing!

What mistaken impressions [18]about nature; about the material world upon which childhood has alighted, and of which it must necessarily be ignorant; about clouds and storms and tempests; and of the heavens above, sun and moon and stars! I remember well when the fable of the Happy Valley in Ra.s.selas was a reality to me; when I thought the sun rose and set for us alone, and how I pitied the glorious...o...b.. as it sunk behind the western mountain, to think that it must pa.s.s through a sort of Hades, through a dark underworld, to come up in the east again. It is a curious fact, that the Egyptians in the morning of the world had the same ideas. Shall I blame Providence for this? Could it be otherwise? If earthly things are so mistaken, is it strange that heavenly things are?

And especially shall I call in question this order of things,--this order, whether of men's or of the world's progress, when I see that it is not only inevitable, the necessary allotment for an experimenting and improving nature, which is human nature, but when I see too that each stage of progress has its own special advantages; that "everything is beautiful in its time;" that fears, superst.i.tions, errors, quicken imagination and restrain pa.s.sion as truly as doubts, reasonings, strugglings, strengthen the judgment, mature the moral nature, and lead to light?

I am dilating upon all this too much, perhaps. I let my pen run.

Sitting down here in the blessed [19]country home, with nothing else in particular just now to do, at the age of sixty-three, I have time and am disposed to look back into my early life and to reason upon it; and although I have nothing uncommon to relate, yet what pertains to me has its own interest and significance, just as if no other being had ever existed, and therefore I set down my experience and my reflections simply as they present themselves to me.

In casting back my eyes upon this earliest period of my life, there are some things which I recall, which may amuse my grandchildren, if they should ever be inclined to look over these pages, and some of which they may find curious, as things of a bygone time.

Children now know nothing of what "'Lection" was in those days, the annual period, that is, when the newly elected State government came in.

It was in the last week in May. How eager were we boys to have the corn planted before that time! The playing could not be had till the work was done. The sports and the entertainments were very simple. Running about the village street, hither and thither, without much aim; stands erected for the sale of gingerbread and beer,--home-made beer, concocted of sa.s.safras roots and wintergreen leaves, etc.; games of ball, not base-ball, as now is the fashion, yet with wickets,--this was about all, except that at the end there was always horse-racing.

Having witnessed this exciting sport in my [20] boyhood, without any suspicion of its being wrong, and seen it abroad in later days, in respectable company, I was led, very innocently, when I was a clergyman in New York, into what was thought a great misdemeanor. I was invited by some gentlemen, and went with them, to the races on Long Island. I met on the boat, as we were returning, a parishioner of mine, who expressed great surprise, and even a kind of horror, when I told him what I had been to see. He could not conceal that he thought it very bad that I should have been there; and I suppose it was. But that was not the worst of it. Some person had then recently heard me preach a sermon in which I said, that, in thesis, I had rather undertake to defend Infidelity than Calvinism. In extreme anger thereat, he wrote a letter to some newspaper, in which, after stating what I had said, he added, "And this clergyman was lately seen at the races!" It went far and wide, you may be sure. I saw it in newspapers from all parts of the country; yet some of my friends, while laughing at me, held it to be only a proof of my simplicity.

There were worse things than sports in our public gatherings; even street fights,--pugilistic fights, hand to hand. I have seen men thus engage, and that in b.l.o.o.d.y encounter, knocking one another down, and the fallen man stamped upon by his adversary. The people gathered round, not to interfere, but to see them fight it out. [21] Such a spectacle has not been witnessed in Sheffield, I think, for half a century. But as to sports and entertainments in general, there were more of them in those days than now. We had more holidays, more games in the street, of ball-playing, of quoits, of running, leaping, and wrestling. The militia musters, now done away with, gave many occasions for them. Every year we had one or two great squirrel-hunts, ended by a supper, paid for by the losing side, that is, by the side shooting the fewest. Almost every season we had a dancing-school. Singing-schools, too, there were every winter. There was also a small band of music in the village, and serenades were not uncommon. We, boys used to give them on the flute to our favorites. But when the band came to serenade us, I shall never forget the commotion it made in the house, and the delight we had in it. We children were immediately up in a wild hurry of pleasure, and my father always went out to welcome the performers, and to bring them into the house and give them such entertainment as he could provide.

The school-days of my childhood I remember with nothing but pleasure. I must have been a dull boy, I suppose, in some respects, for I never got into sc.r.a.pes, never played truant, and was never, that I can remember, punished for anything. The instruction was simple enough. Special stress was laid upon spelling, and I am inclined to think that every one of my fellow-pupils [22] learned to spell more correctly than some gentlemen and ladies do in our days.

Our teachers were always men in winter and women in summer. I remember some of the men very well, but one of them especially. What pupil of his could ever forget Asa Day,--the most extraordinary figure that ever I saw, a perfect chunk of a man? He could not have been five feet high, but with thews and sinews to make up for the defect in height, and a head big enough for a giant. He might have sat for Scott's "Black Dwarf;" yet he was not ill-looking, rather handsome in the face. And I think I never saw a face that could express such energy, pa.s.sion, and wrath, as his. Indeed, his whole frame was instinct with energy. I see him now, as he marched by our house in the early morning, with quick, short step, to make the school-room fire; and a roaring one it was, in a large open fireplace; for he did everything about the school. In fact, he took possession of school, schoolhouse, and district too, for that matter, as if it were a military post; with the difference, that he was to fight, not enemies without, but within,--to beat down insubordination and enforce obedience. And his anger, when roused, was the most remarkable thing. It stands before me now, through all my life, as the one picture of a man in a fury. But if he frightened us children, he taught us too, and that thoroughly.

In general our teachers were held in great [23] reverence and affection.

I remember especially the pride with which I once went in a chaise, when I was about ten, to New Marlborough, to fetch the schoolma'am.

No courtier, waiting upon a princess, could have been prouder or more respectful than I was.

To turn, for a moment, to a different scene, and to much humbler persons, that pa.s.s and repa.s.s in the camera obscura of my early recollections. The only Irishman that was in Sheffield, I think, in those days, lived in my father's family for several years as a hired man,--Richard; I knew him by no other name then, and recall him by no other now,--the tallest and best-formed "exile of Erin" that I have ever seen; prodigiously strong, yet always gentle in manner and speech to us children; with the full brogue, and every way marked in my view, and set apart from every one around him,--"a stranger in a strange land." The only thing besides, that I distinctly remember of him, was the point he made every Christmas of getting in the "Yule-log," a huge log which he had doubtless been saving out in chopping the wood-pile, big enough for a yoke of oxen to draw, and which he placed with a kind of ceremony and respect in the great kitchen fireplace. With our absurd New England Puritan ways, yet naturally derived from the times of the English Commonwealth, when any observance of Christmas was made penal and punished with [24] imprisonment, I am not sure that we should have known anything of Christmas, but for Richard's Yule-log.

There was another cla.s.s of persons who were frequently engaged to do day's work on the farm,--that of the colored people. Some of them had been slaves here in Sheffield. They were virtually emanc.i.p.ated by our State Bill of Rights, pa.s.sed in 1783. The first of them that sought freedom under it, and the first, it is said, that obtained it in New England, was a female slave of General Ashley, and her advocate in the case was Mr. Sedgwick, afterwards Judge Sedgwick, who was then a lawyer in Sheffield.

There were several of the men that stand out as pretty marked individualities in my memory, Peter and Caesar and Will and Darby; merry old fellows they seemed to be,--I see no laborers so cheerful and gay now,--and very faithful and efficient workers. Peter and his wife, Toah (so was she called), had belonged to my maternal grandfather, and were much about us, helping, or being helped, as the case might be. They both lived and died in their own cottage, pleasantly situated on the bank of Sken.o.b Brook. They tilled their own garden, raised their own "sa.r.s.e,"

kept their own cow; and I have heard one say that "Toah's garden had the finest damask roses in the world, and her house, and all around it, was the pink of neatness."

In taking leave of my childhood, I must say [25] that, so far as my experience goes, the ordinary poetic representations of the happiness of that period, as compared with after life, are not true, and I must doubt whether they ought to be true. I was as happy, I suppose, as most children. I had good health; I had companions and sports; the school was not a hardship to me,--I was always eager for it; I was never hardly dealt with by anybody; I was never once whipped in my life, that I can remember; but instead of looking back to childhood as the blissful period of my life, I find that I have been growing happier every year, up to this very time. I recollect in my youth times of moodiness and melancholy; but since I entered on the threshold of manly life, of married and parental life, all these have disappeared. I have had inward struggles enough, certainly,--struggles with doubt, with temptation,--sorrows and fears and strifes enough; but I think I have been gradually, though too slowly, gaining the victory over them. Truth, art, religion,--the true, the beautiful, the divine,--have constantly risen clearer and brighter before me; my family bonds have grown stronger, friends dearer, the world and nature fuller of goodness and beauty, and I have every day grown a happier man.

To take up again the thread of my story, I pa.s.s from childhood to my youth. My winters, up to the age of about sixteen, were given to [26]

school,--the common district-school,--and my summers, to a.s.sisting my father on the farm; after that, for a year or two, my whole time was devoted to preparing for college. For this purpose I went first, for one year, to a school taught in Sheffield by Mr. William H. Maynard, afterwards an eminent lawyer and senator in the State of New York. He came among us with the reputation of being a prodigy in knowledge; he was regarded as a kind of walking library; and this reputation, together with his ceaseless a.s.siduity as a teacher, awakened among us boys an extraordinary ambition. What we learned, and how we learned it, and how we lost it, might well be a caution to all other masters and pupils.

Besides going through Virgil and Cicero's Orations that year, and frequent composition and declamation, we were prepared, at the end of it, for the most thorough and minute examination in grammar, in Blair's Rhetoric, in the two large octavo volumes of Morse's Geography, every fact committed to memory, every name of country, city, mountain, river, every boundary, population, length, breadth, degree of lat.i.tude,--and we could repeat, word for word, the Const.i.tution of the United States. The consequence was, that we dropped all that load of knowledge, or rather burden upon the memory, at the very threshold of the school. Grammar I did study to some purpose that year, though never before. I lost two years of my childhood, I think, upon that study, absurdly [27] regarded as teaching children to speak the English language, instead of being considered as what it properly is, the philosophy of language, a science altogether beyond the reach of childhood.

Of the persons and circ.u.mstances that influenced my culture and character in youth, there are some that stand out very prominently in my recollection, and require mention in this account of myself.

My father, first of all, did all that he could for me. He sent me to college when he could ill afford it. But, what was more important as an influence, all along from my childhood it was evidently his highest desire and ambition for me that I should succeed in some professional career, I think that of a lawyer. I was fond of reading,--indeed, spent most of the evenings of my boyhood in that way,--and I soon observed that he was disposed to indulge me in my favorite pursuit. He would often send out my brothers, instead of me, upon errands or ch.o.r.es, "to save me from interruption." What he admired most, was eloquence; and I think he did more than Cicero's De Oratore to inspire me with a similar feeling. I well remember his having been to Albany once, and having heard Hamilton, and the unbounded admiration with which he spoke of him.

I was but ten years old when Hamilton was stricken down; yet such was my interest in [28] him, and such my grief, that my schoolmates asked me, "What is the matter?" I said, "General Hamilton is dead." "But what is it? Who is it?" they asked. I replied that he was a great orator; but I believe that it was to them much as if I had said that the elephant in a menagerie had been killed. This early enthusiasm I owed to my father. It influenced all my after thoughts and aims, and was an impulse, though it may have borne but little appropriate fruit.

For books to read, the old Sheffield Library was my main resource. It consisted of about two hundred volumes,--books of the good old fashion, well printed, well bound in calf, and well thumbed too. What a treasure was there for me! I thought the mine could never be exhausted. At least, it contained all that I wanted then, and better reading, I think, than that which generally engages our youth nowadays,--the great English cla.s.sics in prose and verse, Addison and Johnson and Milton and Shakespeare, histories, travels, and a few novels. The most of these books I read, some of them over and over, often by torchlight, sitting on the floor (for we had a rich bed of old pine-knots on the farm); and to this library I owe more than to anything that helped me in my boyhood. Why is it that all its volumes are scattered now? What is it that is coming over our New England villages, that looks like deterioration and running down? Is our life going out of us to enrich the great West? [29]I remember the time when there were eminent men in Sheffield. Judge Sedgwick commenced the practice of the law here; and there were Esquire Lee, and John W. Hurlbut, and later, Charles Dewey, and a number of professional men besides, and several others who were not professional, but readers, and could quote Johnson and Pope and Shakespeare; my father himself could repeat the "Essay on Man," and whole books of the "Paradise Lost."

My model man was Charles Dewey, ten or twelve years older than myself. What attracted me to him was a singular union of strength and tenderness. Not that the last was readily or easily to be seen. There was not a bit of sunshine in it,--no commonplace amiableness. He wore no smiles upon his face. His complexion, his brow, were dark; his person, tall and spare; his bow had no suppleness in it, it even lacked something of graceful courtesy, rather stiff and stately; his walk was a kind of stride, very lofty, and did not say "By your leave," to the world. I remember that I very absurdly, though unconsciously, tried to imitate it. His character I do not think was a very well disciplined one at that time; he was, I believe, "a good hater," a dangerous opponent, yet withal he had immense self-command. On the whole, he was generally regarded chiefly as a man of penetrative intellect and sarcastic wit; but under all this I discerned a spirit so true, so delicate and tender, so touched [30] with a profound and exquisite, though concealed, sensibility, that he won my admiration, respect, and affection in an equal degree. He removed early in life to practise the law in Indiana.

We seldom meet; but though twenty years intervene, we meet as though we had parted but yesterday. He has been a Judge of the Supreme Court, and, I believe, the most eminent law authority in his adopted State; and he would doubtless have been sent to take part in the National Councils, but for an uncompromising sincerity and manliness in the expression of his political opinions, little calculated to win votes.

And now came the time for a distinct step forward,--a step leading into future life.

It was for some time a question in our family whether I should enter Charles Dewey's office in Sheffield as a student at law, or go to college. It was at length decided that I should go; and as Williams College was near us, and my cousin, Chester Dewey, was a professor there, that was the place chosen for me. I entered the Soph.o.m.ore cla.s.s in the third term, and graduated in 1814, in my twenty-first year.

Two events in my college life were of great moment to me,--the loss of sight, and the gain, if I may say so, of insight.

In my Junior year, my eyes, after an attack of measles, became so weak that I could not use them more than an hour in a day, and I was [31]

obliged to rely mainly upon others for the prosecution of my studies during the remainder of the college course. I hardly know now whether to be glad or sorry for this deprivation. But for this, I might have been a man of learning. I was certainly very fond of my studies, especially of the mathematics and chemistry. I mention it the rather, because the whole course and tendency of my mind has been in other directions. But Euclid's Geometry was the most interesting book to me in the college course; and next, Mrs. B.'s Chemistry: the first, because the intensest thinking is doubtless always the greatest possible intellectual enjoyment; and the second, because it opened to me my first glance into the wonders of nature. I remember the trembling pride with which, one day in the Junior year, I took the head of the cla.s.s, while all the rest shrunk from it, to demonstrate some proposition in the last book of Euclid. At Commencement, when my cla.s.s graduated, the highest part was a.s.signed to me. "Pretty well for a blind boy," my father said, when I told him of it; it was all he said, though I knew that nothing in the world could have given him more pleasure. But if it was vanity then, or if it seem such now to mention it, I may be pardoned, perhaps, for it was the end of all vanity, effort, or pretension to be a learned man.

I remember when I once told Channing of this, and said that but for the loss of sight I thought I should have devoted myself to the pursuits of learning, his [32] reply was, "You were made for something better." I do not know how that may be; but I think that my deprivation, which lasted for some years, was not altogether without benefit to myself. I was thrown back upon my own mind, upon my own resources, as I should never otherwise have been. I was compelled to think--in such measure as I am able--as I should not otherwise have done. I was astonished to find how dependent I had been upon books, not only for facts, but for the very courses of reasoning. To sit down solitary and silent for hours, and to pursue a subject through all the logical steps for myself,--to mould the matter in my own mind without any foreign aid,--was a new task for me.

Ravignan, the celebrated French preacher, has written a little book on the Jesuit discipline and course of studies, in which he says that the one or two years of silence appointed to the pupil absolute seclusion from society and from books too were the most delightful and profitable years of his novitiate. I think I can understand how that might be true in more ways than one. Madame Guyon's direction for prayer to pause upon each pet.i.tion till it is thoroughly understood and felt had great wisdom in it. We read too much. For the last thirty years I have read as much as I pleased, and probably more than was good for me.

The disease in my eyes was in the optic nerve; there was no external inflammation. Under the [33] best surgical advice I tried different methods of cure,--cupping, leeches, a thimbleful of lunar caustic on the back of the neck, applied by Dr. Warren, of Boston; and I remember spending that very evening at a party, while the caustic was burning.

So hopeful was I of a cure, that the very pain was a pleasure. I said, "Bite, and welcome!" But it was all in vain. At length I met with a person whose eyes had been cured of the same disease, and who gave me this advice: "Every evening, immediately before going to bed, dash on water with your hands, from your wash-bowl, upon your closed eyes; let the water be of about the temperature of spring-water; apply it till there is some, but not severe, pain, say for half a minute; then, with a towel at hand, wipe the eyes dry before opening them, and rub the parts around smartly; after that do not read, or use your eyes in any way, or have a light in the room." I faithfully tried it, and in eight months I began to experience relief; in a year and a half I could read all day; in two years, all night. Let any one lose the use of his eyes for five years, to know what that means. Afterwards I neglected the practice, and my eyes grew weaker; resumed it, and they grew stronger.

The other event to which I have referred as occurring in my college life was of a far different character, and compared to which all this is nothing. It is lamentable that it ever should be an event in any human life. The sense of religion [34] should be breathed into our childhood, into our youth, along with all its earliest and freshest inspirations; but it was not so with me. Religion had never been a delight to me before; now it became the highest. Doubtless the change in its form partook of the popular character usually attendant upon such changes at the time, but the form was not material. A new day rose upon me. It was as if another sun had risen into the sky; the heavens were indescribably brighter, and the earth fairer; and that day has gone on brightening to the present hour. I have known the other joys of life, I suppose, as much as most men; I have known art and beauty, music and gladness; I have known friendship and love and family ties; but it is certain that till we see G.o.d in the world--G.o.d in the bright and boundless universe we never know the highest joy. It is far more than if one were translated to a world a thousand times fairer than this; for that supreme and central Light of Infinite Love and Wisdom, shining over this world and all worlds, alone can show us how n.o.ble and beautiful, how fair and glorious, they are. In saying this, I do not arrogate to myself any unusual virtue, nor forget my defects; these are not the matters now in question. Nor, least of all, do I forget the great Christian ministration of light and wisdom, of hope and help to us. But the one thing that is especially signalized in my experience is this, the Infinite Goodness and Loveliness began to be [35] revealed to me, and this made for me "a new heaven and a new earth."

The sense of religion comes to men under different aspects; that is, where it may be said to come; where it is not imbibed, as it ought to be, in early and unconscious childhood, like knowledge, like social affection, like the common wisdom of life. To some, it comes as the consoler of grief; to others, as the deliverer from terror and wrath To me it came as filling an infinite void, as the supply of a boundless want, and ultimately as the enhancement of all joy. I had been somewhat sad and sombre in the secret moods of my mind, read Kirke White and knew him by heart; communed with Young's "Night Thoughts," and with his prose writings also; and with all their bad taste and false ideas of religion, I think they awaken in the soul the sense of its greatness and its need.

I nursed all this, something like a moody secret in my heart, with a kind of pride and sadness; I had indeed the full measure of the New England boy's reserve in my early experience, and did not care whether others understood me or not. And for a time something of all this flowed into my religion. I was among the strictest of my religious companions.

I was constant to all our religious exercises, and endeavored to carry a sort of Carthusian silence into my Sundays. I even tried, absurdly enough, to pa.s.s that day without a smile upon my countenance. It was on the ascetic side only that I [36] had any Calvinism in my religious views, for in doctrine I immediately took other ground. I maintained, among my companions, that whatever G.o.d commanded us to do or to be, that we had power to do and be. And I remember one day rather impertinently saying to a somewhat distinguished Calvinistic Doctor of Divinity: "You hold that sin is an infinite evil?" "Yes." "And that the atonement is infinite?" "Yes." "Suppose, then, that the first sinner comes to have his sins cancelled; will he not require the whole, and nothing will be left?" "Infinites! infinites!" he exclaimed; "we can't reason about infinites!"

In connection with the religious ideas and impressions of which I have been speaking, comes before me one of the most remarkable persons that I knew in my youth, Paul Dewey, Uncle Paul, we always called him. He was my father's cousin, and married my mother's half-sister. His religion was marked by strong dissent from the prevailing views; indeed, he was commonly regarded as an infidel. But I never heard him express any disbelief of Christianity. It was against the Church construction of it, against the Orthodox creed, and the ways and methods of the religious people about him, that he was accustomed to speak, and that in no doubtful language. I was a good deal with him during the year before I went to college, for he taught me the mathematics; and one day he said to me, "Orville, you are going to college, and you will [37] be converted there." I said, "Uncle, how can you speak in that way to me?"

"Nay," he replied, "I am perfectly serious; you will be converted, and when you are, write to me about it, for I shall believe what you say."

When that happened which he predicted,--when something had taken place in my experience, of which neither he, nor I then, had any definite idea, I wrote to him a long letter, in which I frankly and fully expressed all my feelings, and told him that what he had thus spoken of, whether idly or sincerely, had become to me the most serious reality. I learned from his family afterwards that my letter seemed to make a good deal of impression on him. He was true to what he had said; he did take my testimony into account, and from that time after, spoke with less warmth and bitterness upon such subjects. Doubtless his large sagacity saw an explanation of my experience, different from that which I then put upon it. But he saw that it was at least sincere, and respected it accordingly. Certainly it did not change his views of the religious ministrations of the Church. He declined them when they were offered to him upon his death-bed, saying plainly that he did not wish for them.