There were a good many Quakers, and as my father's people belonged to that body we frequently went to their meeting. The broad brims on one side, with the scoop bonnets on the other, used to excite my curiosity, but I did not like to sit still so long. Sometimes not a word would be said, and after an hour of profound silence, two of the old men on one of the upper seats would shake hands. Then a general shaking of hands ensued on both sides of the house, and meeting was out. Many readers will recall gentle Charles Lamb's thoughtful paper on "A Quakers' Meeting." [Footnote: See _Essays of Elia_.] Several of his reflections rise up so vividly before me as I write these lines that I cannot forbear quoting them. "What," he asks, "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 interconfounding 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 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. 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 Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, --Sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruined sides of kings--