[203]To his Daughter Mary.
SHEFFIELD, July 13, 1848.
DEAR MOLLY,--You're an awful miss when you're not here; what will you
be, then, when you descend upon us from the heights of Lenox,--from
the schools of wisdom, from fiction and fine writing, from tragedy and
comedy, from mountain mirrors reflecting all-surrounding beauty, down
to plain, prosaic still-life in Sheffield? I look with anxiety and
terror for the time; and, to keep you within the sphere of familiarity
as much as possible, I think it best to write sometimes; and, to adopt
the converse of the Western man's calling his bill "William," I call my
William, bill,--my Mary, Molly, thereby softening, mollifying (as I may
say) the case as much as possible.
One thing I must desire of you. You are on an experiment.{19} Now be
honest. Don't bring any "sneeshin" down here to throw dust in our
poor, simple eyes in the valley. Much as ever we can see anything for
fogs. Mind ye, I shall be sharp, though. If you fall into any of those
practices, I shall say you brought the trick from Lenox. You may say
"I-ketch-you" as much as you please, but you won't ketch me.
{FN 19: To try whether the air of Lenox, on the hills, would
have any effect in averting an annual attack of hay-fever.}
To Rev. Henry W. Bellows.
SHEFFIELD, Dec. 19, 1848.
MY DEAR BELLOWS,--Now shall I heap coals of fire on your head. You
ought to have written to me forty days ago. Your letter bears date
of yesterday. I [204] received it this afternoon. I am replying this
evening. How does your brain-pan feel, with this coal upon it? "How has
it happened that there has been no communication?" Why, it has happened
from your being the most unapprehensive mortal that ever lived, or from
your having your wits whirled out of you by that everlasting New York
tornado. As to letters, I wrote the two last, though the latter was a
bit of one. As to the circumstances, my withdrawal from your society
was involuntary, and painful to me. You should have written at once to
your emeritus coadjutor, your senior friend. I have been half vexed
with you, my people quite.
There! I love you too much not to say all that. But I am not an
exacting or punctilious person, and that is one reason why we have got
along so well together 3 as well as that you are one whom nobody can
know without taking a plaguy kindness and respect for, and can't help
it. And all that you say about our past relation and intercourse I
heartily reciprocate, excepting that which does you less than justice,
and me more. As to deep talks, I really believe there is no chance for
them in Gotham. And this reminds me that my wife has just been in my
study to desire me to send a most earnest invitation to you and E. to
come up here this winter and pass a few days with us. It will be easier
than you may think at first. The New York and New Haven Railroad will
be open in a few days, and then you can be here in seven or eight hours
from your own door. Do think of it,--and more than think of it.
To the Same.
ARE n't you a pretty fellow,--worse than Procrustes,--to go about
the world, measuring people's talent and [205] promise by their
noses? . . . Why, man, Claude Lorraine and Boccaccio and Burke had
"small noses;" and Kosciusko and George Buchanan had theirs turned up,
and could n't help it. It reminds me of what a woman of our town said,
who had married a very heinous-looking blacksmith. Some companions
of our "smithess" saw him coming along in the street one day, and
unwittingly exclaimed, "What dreadful-looking man is that?" "That's my
husband," said the wife, "and God made him."
To the Same.
SHEFFIELD, Jan. 2, 1849.
MY DEAR BELLOWS,--Your letter came on New Year's Day, and helped to
some of those cachinnations usually thought to belong to such a time;
though for my part I can never find set times particularly happy or
even interesting,--partly, I believe, from a certain obstinacy of
disposition that does not like to do what is set down for it.
As to church matters, I said nothing to you when I was down last,
because I knew nothing. That is, I had no hint of what the congregation
was about to do,--no idea of anything in my connection with the church
that needed to be spoken of. I was indeed thinking, for some weeks
before I went down, of saying to the congregation, that unless they
thought my services very important to them, I should rather they would
dispense with them, and my mind was just in an even balance about the
matter. But one is always influenced by the feeling around him,--at
least I am,--and when I found that every one who spoke with me about my
coming again seemed to depend upon it, and to be much [206] interested
in it, I determined to say nothing about withdrawing. My reasons for
wishing to retire were, that I was working hard--hard for me--to
prepare sermons which, as my engagement in my view was temporary, might
be of no further use to me; and that if I were to enter upon a new
course of life, the sooner I did so the better.
And here I may as well dispose of what you and others say and urge with
regard to my continuance in the profession. To your question whether I
have not sermons enough to last me for five years in some new place, I
answer, No, not enough for two. And if I had, I tell you that I cannot
enter into these affecting and soul-exhausting relations again and
again, any more than I could be married three or four times. The great
trial of our calling is the wrenching, the agonizing, of sympathy with
affliction; and there is another trying thing which I have thought
of much of late, and that is the essential moral incongruity of such
relations, and especially with strangers. I almost feel as if nobody
but an intimate friend had any business in a house of deep affliction.
In a congregation ever so familiar there is trial enough of this kind.
If my friend is sick or dying, I go to his bedside of course, but it is
as a friend,--to say a word or many words as the case may be; to look
what I cannot say; to do what I can. But to come there, or to come to
the desolate mourner, in an official capacity,--there is something in
this which is in painful conflict with my ideas of the simple relations
of man with man. Now all this difficulty is greatly increased when
one enters upon a new ministration in a congregation of strangers.
Therefore on every account I must say, no more pastoral relations for
me. I cannot take [207] up into my heart another heap of human chance
and change and sorrow. Do you not see it? Why, what takes place in New
Bedford now moves me a hundred times more than all else that is in the
world. And so it will always be with all that befalls my brethren in
the Church of the Messiah.
As to the world's need of help, I regard it doubtless as you do; and
I am willing and desirous to help it from the pulpit as far as I am
able. But I cannot hold that sort of irregular connection with the
pulpit called "supplying "; nor can I go out on distant missionary
enterprises,--to Cincinnati, Mobile, or New Orleans. The first would
yield me no support; and as to the last, I must live in my family.
Besides, there is sphere enough with the pen; and study may do the
world as much good as action. And there is no doubt what direction
my studies must take. Why, I have written out within a week--written
incontinently in my commonplace book, my pen would run on--a thesis on
Pantheism nearly as long as a sermon. And as to preaching, what ground
have I to think that mine is of any particular importance? Not that
I mean to affect any humility which I do not feel. I profess that I
have quite a good opinion of myself as a preacher. Seriously; I think
I have one or two rather remarkable qualifications for preaching,--a
sense of reality in the matter of the vitality of the thing, and then
an edge of feeling (so it seems to me) which takes off the technical
and commonplace character from discourse. Oh! if I could add, a full
sense of the divineness of the thing, I should say all. Yet something
of this, too, I hope; and I hope to grow in this as I hope to live, and
do not dread to die. But though I think all this, with all due modesty,
it does not [208] follow that others do; and the evidence seems to be
rather against it, does it not?
As ever, yours,