ORVILLE DEWEY.
From a Note-Book.
April 13, 1871.
FATHER TAYLOR, of Boston, has just died,-a very remarkable person. He was a sailor, and more than [313] forty years ago he came from before the mast into the pulpit. He brought with him, I suppose, something of the roughness of his calling; for I remember hearing of his preaching in the neighborhood of New Bedford when I first went there, and of his inveighing against paid preachers as wretched hirelings, "rocked upon five feather-beds to hell." This, I was told, was meant for me, as I had just been settled upon the highest salary ever paid in those parts. In after years I became acquainted with him, and a very pleasant and cordial acquaintance it was. His preaching improved in every way as he went on; the pulpit proved the best of rhetorical schools for him, and he became one of the most powerful and impressive preachers in the country. He was one of nature's orators, and one of the rarest. It was said of him that he showed what Demosthenes meant by "action." The whole man, body and soul, was not only in action, but was an action concentrated into speech. His strongly built frame,—every limb, muscle, and fibre,—his whole being, spoke.
Waldo Emerson took me to his chapel the first time I ever heard him preach. As we went along, speaking of his pathos, he said, "You 'll have to guard yourself to keep from crying." So warned, I thought myself safe enough. But I was taken down at the very beginning of the service. The prayers of the congregation were asked by the family of a young man,—a sailor, who had been destroyed by a shark on the coast of Africa. In' the prayer, the scene was touchingly depicted,—how the poor youth went down to bathe in the summer sea, thoughtless, unconscious of any danger, when he was seized by the terrible monster that lay in wait for him. And then the preacher prayed that none of us, going [314]down into the summer sea of pleasure, might sink into the jaws of destruction that were opened beneath. I think the prayer left no dry eyes.
Father Taylor was a man of large, warm-hearted liberality. He was a Methodist; but no sect could hold him. He often came to our Unitarian meetings and spoke in them. In addressing one of our autumnal conventions in New York, I recollect his congratulating us on our freedom from all trammels of prescription, creed, and church order, and exhorting us to a corresponding wide and generous activity in the cause of religion. He was always ready with an illustration, and for his purpose used this: "We have just had a visit in Boston," he said, "from an Indian chief and some of his people. They were invited to the house of Mr. Abbot Lawrence. As Mr. Lawrence received them in his splendid parlor, the chief, looking around upon it, said, It is very good; it is beautiful; but I—I walk large; I go through the woods and hunting-grounds one day, and I rise up in the morning and go through them the next,—I walk large. "Brethren," said the speaker, "walk large."
Taylor's great heart was not chilled by bigotry; neither was it by theology, nor by philosophy. His prayer was the breathing of a child's heart to an infinitely loving father; it was strangely free and confiding. I remember being in one of the early morning prayer-meetings of an anniversary week in Boston, and Taylor was there. As I rose to offer a prayer, I spoke a few words upon the kind of approach which we might make to the Infinite Being. Something like this I said,—that as we were taught to believe that we were made in the image of God, and were his children, emanations from the Infinite Perfection, [315]partakers of the divine nature; as the Infinite One had sent forth a portion of His own nature to dwell in these forms of frail mortality and imperfection, and no darkness, no sorrow, nor erring of ours could reach to Him; might we not think,—God knows, I said, that I would be guilty of no irreverence or presumption,-but might we not think that with infinite consideration and pity he looks down upon us struggling with our load; upon our weakness and trouble, upon our penitence and aspiration?
As the congregation was retiring, and I was passing in the aisle, I saw Father Taylor sitting by the pulpit, and he beckoned me aside. "Brother Dewey," he said, in his emphatic way, "did you ever know any one to say what you have been saying this morning?"-"Why," I replied, "does not every one say it?"—"No," he answered; "I have talked with a thousand ministers, and no one of them ever said that."
To William Cullen Bryant, Esq.
ST. DAVID'S, Sept. 12, 1871.