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![1]
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--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 gravely felt 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.--I 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 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 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 confession--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 Risus-que--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.--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.
[Footnote 1: From "Poems of all sorts," by Richard Fleckno, 1653.]