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Still-born Silence! thou that
art
Flood-gate of the deeper heart!
Offspring of a heavenly kind!
Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind!
Secrecy's confident, and he
Who makes religion mystery!
Admiration's speaking'st tongue!
Leave, thy desert shades among,
Reverend hermits' hallowed cells,
Where retired devotion dwells!
With thy enthusiasms come,
Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb!*
[Footnote] * From " Poems of all sorts," by Richard Fleckno, 1653.
Reader, would'st thou know what true
peace and quiet mean; would'st thou find a refuge from the noises
and clamours of the multitude; would'st thou enjoy at once solitude
and society; would'st thou possess the depth of thy own spirit
in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces
of thy species; would'st thou be alone, and yet accompanied; solitary,
yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee
in countenance; a unit in aggregate; a simple in composite : --
come with me into a Quaker's Meeting.
Dost thou love silence deep as that
"before the winds were made?" go not out into the wilderness,
descend not into the profundities of the earth; shut not up thy
casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with
little-faith'd self-mistrusting Ulysses. -- Retire with me into
a Quaker's Meeting.
For a man to refrain even from good
words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude,
it is great mastery.
What is the stillness of the desert,
compared with this place? what the uncommunicating muteness of
fishes? -- here the goddess reigns and revels. -- "Boreas,
and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their inter-confounding
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.
Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes
would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight.
There are wounds, which an imperfect
solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth
by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain
in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quaker's Meeting.
Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when
they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals,
to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is
bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness.
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 communication? -- can 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-stricken;
Or under hanging mountains,
Or by the fall of fountains;
is but a vulgar luxury, compared with
that which those enjoy, who come together for the purposes of
more complete, 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 Quaker's Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions,
-- sands, ignoble things,
Dropt from the ruined sides of kings--
but here is something, which throws
Antiquity herself into the fore-ground -- Silence -- the eldest
of things -- language of old Night -- primitive Discourser --
to which the insolent 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! convocation without intrigue! parliament
without debate! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to
consistory -- if my pen treat of you lightly -- as haply it will
wander -- yet my spirit hath the wisdom of your custom, when sitting
among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would
rather confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your
beginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury.
-- I have witnessed that, which brought before my eyes your heroic
tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences
of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest
you -- for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the
out-cast and off-scowering of church and presbytery. -- have seen
the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle,
with the avowed intention 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 recommend to you, above all church-narratives, to
read Sewel's 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 affecting than any thing you will read
of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you,
nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or
dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the
true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath
been a by-word in your mouth,) -- James Naylor: what dreadful
sufferings, with what patience, he endured even to the boring
through of his tongue with 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 common converts from enthusiasm,
who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can
never 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 what
proportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of
Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies,
upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others again I have
watched, when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in
which I could possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But
quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence
of the fierce controversial workings. -- If the spiritual pretensions
the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites
they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom indeed
that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only
now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is
heard -- you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds
-- with a low, buzzing., musical sound, laying out a few words
which "she thought might suit the condition 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 men,
for what I observed, speak seldomer.
Once only, and it was some years ago,
I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian orgasm. 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 knees to
fail -- his joints all seemed loosening -- it was a figure to
set off against Paul Preaching -- 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 world's
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
incongruity of the confusion -- understanding 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
understood 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 Tongue,
that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You
have bathed with stillness. when the spirit is sore fretted, even
tired to sickness of the janglings, and nonsense-noises of the
world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself,
for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench,
among the gentle Quakers!
Their garb and stillness conjoined,
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 cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, 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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