Those who have been accustomed to visit the bookstore of Bartlett & Welford, under the Astor House, during the last half-dozen years, must have been familiar with the commanding figure and gentle but uneasy expression of our late excellent friend, the Rev. Sereno E. Dwight, D. D., who died in Philadelphia on the thirtieth of November, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. Dr. Dwight was born in Greenfield, Connecticut, in 1786, and was educated at Yale College, where he was graduated in 1803, being then about seventeen years of age. He became a tutor in the college, but soon abandoned this occupation to commence the study of the law at Burlington in Vermont, and in a few years he was admitted to practice in the highest courts of the country. An early and ever-increasing predilection, however, led him to the profession of his father, and upon completing his theological studies he was settled over the Park-street Congregational church, in Boston, where, he rapidly acquired the fame of being one of the ablest, most eloquent, and most useful divines in New-England.

He had contracted a cutaneous disease, from the injudicious use of calomel, while a tutor in Yale College; and its effects increased so much now, that his parishioners, who had become quite attached to him, in 1825 induced him to undertake a voyage to Europe. A year's travel, in Great Britain, Germany, France, and other countries, failed to restore his health, and soon after his return to the United States he resigned his charge of the Park-street church, and undertook the Presidency of Hamilton College, which in turn he was compelled to surrender, and in 1830 he opened, at New-Haven, an Academy, in which he was assisted by his wife, a daughter of the late Judge Daggett. The decline of Mrs. Dwight's health, and other circumstances, induced him to relinquish the business of teaching; he visited the Southern States, was during several sessions chaplain to the United States Senate, and, devoting himself to literature, wrote an elaborate memoir of his great-grandfather, Jonathan Edwards, and several works of less importance, one of which was "The Hebrew Wife," written to illustrate the Jewish laws of marriage, and published in New-York in 1836.

The death of his wife, and increasing physical infirmities, led him to adopt a habit of the utmost seclusion in New-York, where he passed nearly all the residue of his life. His last appearance in public was in the summer of 1848, when he consented to act with Mr. John R. Bartlett (now the chief of the Mexican Boundary Commission) and the writer of these paragraphs, as an examiner of one of the departments of the Rutgers Female Institute. He died suddenly, while upon a visit to Philadelphia for the purpose of trying the effect of the hydropathic treatment of his disease, on the 30th of September. In the Home Journal of December 14, Mr. Willis says of him:—

"In the death of this excellent man we have lost a friend, whose loss to ourself we most sincerely mourn, though the grave was, to him, a welcome relief from an insufferable disease, that had made life wretched for years. Mr. Dwight was the son of Rev. Dr. Dwight, President of Yale College. He became pastor of Park-st. church, in Boston, while we attended it in boyhood, and it is our pride to record that we were so fortunate as to secure his friendship at that time, and to retain it, in undiminished warmth and kindness, to the day of his death. Mr. Dwight was a man of qualities unusual in his profession. When he first came to Boston, in perfect health, he was, in personal appearance, the ideal of a high-souled and faultlessly elegant gentleman—with more of manly and refined beauty, indeed, than we remember to have combined in any other man. He wore these winning gifts most unconsciously, being beloved by the humblest for his open and accessible simplicity and kindness: and his health first gave way under the laborious discharge of his parochial duties. He was too severely critical and polished a scholar to be either a very eloquent preacher or an easy writer, but his sermons were models of purity of style, study, and elevated thought, and his pastoral intercourse and counsel were too delightful ever to be forgotten by those who enjoyed it. Sent to Europe for his health, by his congregation, Mr. Dwight was received and followed with a degree of enthusiastic and flattering attention which fully confirmed his mark as a man, and showed how Nature's noblemen are recognized and honored everywhere. He resumed his duties on his return, but was soon obliged by illness to relinquish them, and, from that time forward, he was never again well. His weakness took the shape of a cutaneous disease of the most irritating and incurable form, and though he made one or two attempts at re-commencing his usefulness, it was sadly in vain. He resided secludedly in New-York during the latter years of his life, giving to books and scholarship what mind he could withdraw from pain, and, even thus, ready always with kindness and delightful earnestness, to give counsel or sympathy to those he loved. Mr. Dwight was a martyr to that great wrong of our country toward all clergymen—to express it by a common saying, "the working a free horse to death"—and we have only to look at the pale faces, the stooping chests, and the slender frames of most of our clerical men, to see how mind, patience, attention, needful leisure and more needful sleep, are cruelly overdrawn upon, by the service expected of them. But for his share of suffering by this exacting system, Mr. Dwight might have been, for years to come, the ornament and pride to his country which his unequalled combination of fine gifts qualified him to be; and we should not mourn, as we now do, over his life embittered while it lasted, and sent to the grave in what might have been its meridian of usefulness and ornament."