The Project Gutenberg EBook of Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey,
D.D., by Orville Dewey

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Title: Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D.
Edited by his Daughter

Author: Orville Dewey

Editor: Mary Dewey

Release Date: July 31, 2006 [EBook #18956]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS OF ORVILLE DEWEY ***

Produced by Edmund Dejowski

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS OF ORVILLE DEWEY, D.D.

Edited by his Daughter Mary 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he had been so long withdrawn that his death was hardly felt beyond the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 multitudes 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 hav