re the moth.

[190] Monday morning. These tantrums, dear Molly, were--what? cut
up?-last night after preaching, and mortal tired I was too. I do not
know how it is, but it seems to me that every sermon I take now, every
poor, little, innocent sermon comes bouncing out in the pulpit like a
Brobdingnag.

To Rev. William Ware.

SHEFFIELD, Aug. 22, 1847.

DEAR FRIEND,--I don't like Commencements. I hate travelling. And just
now I hate my pen so much that I can scarce muster patience to tell you
so.

I have been reading Prescott's "Peru." What a fine accomplishment there
is about it! And yet there is something wanting to me in the moral
nerve. History should teach men how to estimate characters. It should be
a teacher of morals. And I think it should make us shudder at the names
of Cortez and Pizarro. But Prescott's does not. He seems to have a kind
of sympathy with these inhuman and perfidious adventurers, as if they
were his heroes. It is too bad to talk of them as the soldiers of
Christ. If it were said of the Devil, they would have better fitted the
character.

Monday morning. The shadows of the lilac fall upon my page, checkered
with the slant rays of the morning light; there is a slope of green
grass under the window; here is quiet all around; I wish you were here.

My love to your wife and children.

Yours as ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

[191]To the Same.

SHEFFIELD, Sept. 30, 1847.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I should have answered your letter of the 6th before,
but sermons have been in hand or the first and second Sundays of October
in New York, and my hand is commonly too weary, when engaged in such
tasks, to turn to anything else.

I sent the late edition of my--things (works, they call 'em) to the
Harvard College Library, and if you will take the second volume, you
will see, in a sermon "On the Slavery Question," how entirely I agree
with you hat this is the great trial question of the country. And I
think it will press upon the country this coming winter is it never has
before. It certainly will if the Californias are ceded to us, and the
Wilmot Proviso is brought before Congress, not for hypothetical, but
for practical, actual decision. If it should be, I entertain the most
painful apprehensions for the result. We have lost a host by the death
of Silas Wright. A sagacious politician said to a friend of mine the
other day, "It is a special providence, for it has saved us from a
dissolution of the Union." His