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 emoti