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Still-born Silehou that artFlood-gate of the deeper heart!
Offspring of a heavenly kind!
Frost o the mouth, and thaw o the mind!
Secrecy<s>藏书网</s>s fident, and he
Who makes religion mystery!
Admirations speakingst tongue!
Leave, thy desert shades among,
?9９lib.Reveres hallowed cells,
Where retired devotion dwells!
With thy enthusiasms e,
Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb!*
[Footnote] * From " Poems of all sorts," by Richard Fleo, 1653.
_________
Reader, wouldst thou know what true pead quiet mean; wouldst thou find a refuge from the noises and clamours of the multitude; wouldst thou enjoy at once solitude and society; wouldst thou possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the solatory faces of thy species; wouldst thou be alone, a apanied; solitary, yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in tenance; a unit in aggregate; a simple in posite : -- e with me into a Quakers Meeting.
Dost thou love silence deep as that "before the winds were made?" go not out into the wilderness, desd not into the profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faithd self-mistrusting Ulysses. -- Retire with me into a Quakers Meeting.
For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is endable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery.
What is the stillness of the desert, pared with this place? what the ununig muteness of fishes? -- here the goddess reigns and revels. -- "Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their inter-founding uproars more augment the brawl -- nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds -- than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. ion itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight.
There are wounds, whi imperfect solitude ot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man eh by himself. The perfect is that which he sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers Meeting. Those first hermits did certainly uand this principle, when they retired iian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one anothers want of versation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of inunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by -- say, a wife -- he, or she, too, (if that be probable), reading another, without interruption, or oral unication? -- there be no sympathy without the gabble of words? -- away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmerman, a sympathetic solitude.
To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, time-stri;
Or under hanging mountains,
Or by the fall of fountains;
is but a vulgar luxury, pared with that which those enjoy, who e together for the purposes of more plete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness "to be felt." -- The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions,
-- sands, ighings,
Dropt from the ruined sides of kings--
but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the fround -- Silence -- the eldest of things -- language of old Night -- primitive Discourser -- to which the i decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression.
How reverend is the view of these hushed heads,
Looking tranquillity!
Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod! vocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a lesson dost thou read to cil, and to sistory -- if my pe of you lightly -- as haply it will wander -- yet my spirit hath the wisdom of your , when sitting among you i peace, whie out-welling tears would rather firm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of yinnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. -- I have withat, which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the i soldiery, republi or royalist, sent to molest you -- for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the out-cast and off-sc of churd presbytery. -- have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed iion of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remembered Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and "the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet."
Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would reend to you, above all churarratives, to read Sewels History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox, and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affeg than any thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspi of alloy, no drop of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that mujured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth,) -- James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with atience, he endured even to the b through of his toh red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatised for blasphemy, had given- way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still -- so different from the practice of your on verts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they ever get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated.
Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart; and love the early Quakers.
How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive spirit, or in roportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits aloermine. I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. ain I have watched, when my thoughts should have beeer engaged, in which I could possibly deteothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce troversial ws. -- If the spiritual pretensions the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preag. It is seldom ihat you shall see o up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally a, voice is heard -- you ot guess from art of the meeting it proceeds -- with a low, buzzing., musical sound, laying out a few words which "she thought might suit the dition of some present," with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that any thing of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty.-- The <bdi></bdi>men, for what I observed, speak seldomer.
Only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian asm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced "from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit -- I dare not say, of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable -- he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his ko fail -- his joints all seemed loosening -- it was a figure to set off against Paul Preag -- the words he uttered were few, and sound -- he was evidently resisting his will -- keeping down his own word-wisdom with more mighty effort, than the worlds orators strain for theirs. "He had been a Wit in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking ingruity of the fusion -- uanding the term in its worldly acceptation -- with the frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levities -- the Jocos Risusque -- faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna. -- By wit, even in his youth, I will be sworn he uood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty.
More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tohat unruly member, ha?s strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to siess of the janglings, and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go a yourself, for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed er of a bench, among the gentle Quakers!
Their garb and stillness joined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-like -- as in the pasture -- "forty feeding like one." -
The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and liness io be something more than the absence of its trary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they e up in bands to their Whitsun-ferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones.
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