. . . I do not think I shall go to the great May meetings in Boston. I am afraid I am not made for them. It wants a man, at any rate, with all his faculties about him, ready and apt and in full vigor; and mine are not,—certainly not now-a-days, if they ever are. The condition of my brain at present makes quiet necessary to me. Every exertion is now something too much.
I have addressed the trustees of the church to-day, to express my conviction to them that, by next autumn, some material change must be made. By that time all my sermons will be preached to death, and I shall have no power to make new ones. The church must determine whether it will relinquish my services entirely, or have them one quarter or one third of the time.
The thought of having soon to be clone with time and life has almost oppressed me for the year past, so constantly has it been with me. And indeed I have felt that there may be too much of this for the vigor, not to say the needful buoyancy, of life. Earth is our school, our sphere; and I more than doubt whether the anchorite's dreaming of heaven, or the spirit of the "Saints' Rest," is the true spiritual condition. I have long wanted to review Baxter's work, in this and other views.
With my love to your wife and children,—I mean, by your leave, your wife especially,—I am, as ever, Yours,
ORVILLE DEWEY.
[185] To the Same.
NEW YORK, July 10, 1846.
MY DEAR FRIEND,—If from this awful heat (90 degrees in my study) where I am busy, I were not going to an equally awful country heat where I shall be lazy, I would put off writing a few days. . . . My principal—no, I won't say that—my most painful business is hunting up sermons fit to be preached. The game grows scarce, and my greatest vexation is that every now and then, when I think I have got a fox or a beaver, it turns out to be a woodchuck or a muskrat.
From the tenor of some of our late letters, I believe we should be thought to belong to the "Mutual Admiration Society." I deny that of us both, though appearances are rather against us. I will have done, at any rate, for your last has quite knocked me down, or rather so outrageously set me up, as I was never before.
With regard to my plans, I myself prefer four months in the pulpit here, and that was what I proposed; but something had been said by me, about three months in a different connection, and the congregation, I am told, thought that in naming three they were conforming precisely to my wishes. But that will be arranged satisfactorily. I am to go out of town, of course; I cannot live here upon a quarter or third of a salary. I have something of my own, this house and a little more,—twelve thousand dollars, perhaps, in all; so far I have carried out the plan you speak of. I have had reasons more than most others for attending to the means, for I am the only surviving male member of my family. I have had the satisfaction of doing something for them all along, and shall have that of leaving to my mother [186] and sisters a house to cover them, and forty acres of land. . . .