[145] The letters, and every other advantage that the kindness of
friends could provide, were given him, and the mingled anticipations
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 association 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 Berkshire, 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 passed 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 God. '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
God."
"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 compassed 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. His action, so full of meaning and so effective, was no studied
or superficial movement of hand and voice, but the action of the whole
man, body and soul, all powerfully quickened and moved from within by
the living thoughts and emotions to which he was giving utterance."
"I have heard many of the greatest orators of our time. But, with the
exception of Daniel Webster and Dr. Channing in their highest moments,
Mr. Dewey was the most [149] eloquent man among them all, and that not
once or twice, on great occasions, but Sunday after Sunday, forenoon
and afternoon, for months together."
"Some allowance should perhaps be made for the state of mind and the
period of life in which I heard him. I had just come from college,
where the intellect had been cultivated in advance of the moral and
religious faculties. The equilibrium which belongs to a perfectly
healthy and harmonious nature was disturbed, and, as a necessary
consequence of this unbalanced and distempered condition, there was
a deep inward unrest, and a craving for something,--the greatest of
all,--which had not yet been attained. Mr. Dewey's preaching came in
just at this critical time, and it was to me the opening into a new
world. The hymn, the prayer, the Scripture reading, usually brought
me into a reverent and plastic state of mind, ready to receive and
be moulded by the deepest and loftiest Christian truths. From the
beginning to the end of the sermon I was under the spell which he had
thrown over me, and unconscious of everything else. Very seldom during
my life, and then only for a few minutes at a time, has any one, by his
eloquence, exercised this absorbing and commanding influence over me.
Once or twice in hearing Dr. Channing I felt as I suppose the prophet
may have felt when he heard 'the still small voice,' at which 'he
wrapped his face in his mantle,' and listened as to the voice of God.
A few such experiences I have had with other men; but with Mr. Dewey
more than with all others. And when the benediction was pronounced,
I wished to go away and be by myself in the new world of spiritual
ideas and emotions into which I had been drawn. Those were to me great
experiences, [150] inwrought into the inmost fibres of my nature, and
always associated in my mind with Mr. Dewey's preaching."
"Nor were these experiences peculiar to any one person. The audience as
a whole were affected in a similar manner. A deep solemnity pervaded
the place. There was not merely silence, but the spell of absorbed
attention that makes itself felt, and spreads itself as by a general
sympathy through a congregation profoundly moved by great thoughts
filled out and made alive by deep and uplifting emotions. The exercises
in the church were often followed by lasting convictions. The Sunday's
sermon was the topic, not of curious discussion or indiscriminate
eulogy, but of serious conversation among the young, who looked
forward to the coming Sunday as offering privileges which it would be
a misfortune to lose. The services of the church were remembered and
anticipated as the most interesting and important event of the week."
"I shall never cease to think with gratitude of Mr. Dewey's preaching.
In common with other great preachers of our denomination,--Dr.
Channing, for example, Dr. Nichols, and Dr. Walker,--he spoke as one
standing within the all-encompassing and divine presence. He awakened
in us a sense of that august and indefinable influence from which all
that is holiest and best must come. He brought us into communication
with that Light of life. He showed us how our lives, our thoughts,
and even our every-day acts, may be sanctified and inspired by it, as
every plant and tree is not only illuminated by the sun but vitally
associated with it."
"If, in the light of later experience, I were to criticise [151] the
preaching I then heard, I should say that it was too intense. The
writing and the delivery of such sermons subjected the preacher to too
severe a strain both of body and mind. No man could go on preaching in
that way, from month to month, without breaking down in health. And
it may be questioned whether a mind acting under so high a pressure
is in the best condition to take just views, to preserve its proper
equipoise, or to impart wise and healthful instruction. The stimulus
given may be too strong for the best activity of those who receive
it. They whose sensitive natures are most deeply affected by such
an example may, under its influence, unconsciously form an ideal of
intellectual attainments too exacting, and therefore to them a source
of weakness rather than of strength."
"The danger lies in these directions. But Mr. Dewey's breadth of
apprehension, his steadfast loyalty and devotion to the truth,
the judicial impartiality with which he examined the whole field
before making up his mind, saved him from one-sided or ill-balanced
conclusions. And the intense action of all the faculties not only
enables a man of extraordinary intellectual powers to impress his
thought on others and infuse his very soul into theirs; but it also, as
we see in the best work of Channing, Dewey, and Emerson, opens to them
realms of thought which otherwise might never have been reached, and
gives to them glimpses of a divine love and splendor never granted to a
less earnest and passionate devotion."
In the autumn of 1835 Mr. Dewey was settled over the Second Unitarian
Church in New York, trusting to his stock of already written discourses
[152] to save him from a stress of intellectual labor too severe for
his suffering brain, which was never again to allow him uninterrupted
activity in study. When his life-work is viewed, it should always be
remembered under what difficulties it was carried on. It was work that
taxed every faculty to the uttermost, while the physical organ of
thought had been so strained by over-exertion at the beginning of his
professional career, owing to a general ignorance of the bodily laws
even greater then than it is now, that the use of it during the rest of
his life was like that which a man has of a sprained foot; causing pain
in the present exercise, and threatening far worse consequences, if
the effort is continued. Fortunately, his health in all other respects
was excellent, and his spirits and courage seldom flagged. I remember
him as lying much on the sofa in those days, and liking to have his
head "scratched" by the hour together, with a sharp-pointed comb, to
relieve by external irritation the distressing sensation's, which he
compared to those made, sometimes by a tightening ring, sometimes by
a leaden cap, and sometimes (but this was in later life) by a dull
boring instrument. Yet he was the centre of the family life, and of its
merriment as well; and his strong social instincts and lively animal
spirits made him full of animation and vivacity in society, although he
was soon tired, and with a nervous restlessness undoubtedly the effect
of disease, never wanted to stay long in any company. [153] He preached
a sermon after the great fire in New York, in December, 1835, which
drew forth the following letter from Mr. Henry Ware:--
CAMBRIDGE, Jan. 15, 1836.
DEAR FRIEND,--I must acknowledge your sermon,-you made me most happy
by it. It was so true, so right, so strongly and movingly put; it was
the word that ought to be said, the word in season. My feeling was: God
Almighty be praised for sending that man there to speak to that great
and mighty city, and to interpret to it his providence. You cannot
but feel gratitude in being appointed to be such an instrument; and I
trust that you are to be used much and long, and for great good. Keep
yourself well and strong; look on yourself as having a message and a
mission, and live for nothing else but to perform it.
I happen to have found out, very accidentally, what is always the most
secret of undiscoverable secrets,--that you are asked to preach the
Dudleian Lecture. Do not let anything hinder you. We want you: you must
come; do not hesitate; and, mind, I speak first, to have you come and
house it with me while you are in Cambridge. Pray, deny me not.
Shall I tell you? Your sermon made me cry so that I could not finish
reading it, but was obliged to lay it down. Not from its pathos,--but
from a stronger, higher, deeper, holier something which it stirred up.
I am almost afraid for you when I think what a responsibility lies on
you for the use of such powers. May He that gave them give you grace
with them! Love to you and yours, and all peace be with you. Yours ever,