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 Quakers' 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 Quakers' 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 soundsthan 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 Quakers' 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. 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, In 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 Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruined sides of kingsbut here is something which throws Antiquity herself into the foreground-SILENCE-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, 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 anything 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 stigmatized 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 y 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 sat visibly brooding. Others again have I 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 of 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 anything of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty. The men, for what I have observed, speak seldomer.. 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. O 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. 20. Thomas Campbell, 1777-1844. (Handbook, pars. 227, 435-) The Final Triumph of Hope. Eternal Hope! when yonder spheres sublime Pleasures of Hope Ye Mariners of England: a Naval Ode. That guard our native seas; Whose flag has braved, a thousand years, Your glorious standard launch again And sweep through the deep, While the stormy tempests blow; While the battle rages loud and long, And the stormy tempests blow. The spirits of your fathers Shall start from every wave! For the deck it was their field of fame, Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell, As ye sweep through the deep, Britannia needs no bulwark, No towers along the steep; Her march is o'er the mountain waves, Her home is on the deep. With thunders from her native oak, When the stormy tempests blow: Till danger's troubled night depart, When the storm has ceased to blow; Hohenlinden. On Linden, when the sun was low, But Linden saw another sight, By torch and trumpet fast arrayed, Then shook the hills with thunder riven, But redder yet that light shall glow |