den Wedding
Day.

So you can look upon us with pleasure, on the day after Christmas, and
think of us as surrounded by all our children and grandchildren.
And that is all we shall make, except in our thoughts, of our great
anniversary.

Adieu. I shall not descend in this letter to meaner themes, but with our
love to you all, am ever,

Your friend,

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 libe