Still-born Silehou that art
Flood-gate of the deeper heart!
Offspring of a heavenly kind!
Frost o the mouth, and thaw o the mind!
Secrecys fident, and he
Who makes religion mystery!
Admirations speakingst tongue!
Leave, thy desert shades among,
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--
bu