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laughter as oftentimes is thrown off from the fields of ocean, laughter that hides, or that seems to evade mustering tumult; foam-bells that weave garlands of phosphoric radiance for one moment round the eddies of gleaming abysses; mimicries of earth-born flowers that for the eye raise phantoms of gayety, as oftentimes for the ear they raise the echoes of fugitive laughter, mixing with the ravings and choir-voices of an angry sea.

What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, O reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before; and yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if in the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is any thing fantastic, or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not, and can not be, such incoherences. The fleeting accidents of a man's life, and its external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organizing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined centers, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have accumulated from without, will not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled, in the retrospect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions.

Such a convulsion is the struggle of gradual suffocation, as in drowning; and, in the original "Opium Confessions," I mentioned a case of that nature, communicated to me by a lady from her own childish experience. The lady is still living, though now of unusually great age: and I may mention, that amongst her faults never was numbered any levity of principle, or carelessness of the most scrupulous veracity, but, on the contrary, such faults as arise from austerity, too harsh, perhaps, and gloomy, indulgent neither to others nor herself; and at the time of relating this incident, when already very old, she had become religious to asceticism. According to my present belief, she had completed her ninth year, when, playing by the side of a solitary brook, she fell into one of its deepest pools. Eventually, but after what lapse of time nobody ever knew, she was saved from death by a farmer, who, riding in some distant lane, had seen her rise to the surface; but not until she had descended within the abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as far, perhaps, as ever human eye can have looked, that had permission to return. At a certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike her; phosphoric

radiance sprang forth from her eyeballs; and immediately a mighty theater expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act, every design, of her past life, lived again, arraying themselves, not as a succession, but as parts of a co-existence. Such a light fell upon the whole path of her life backwards into the shades of infancy as the light, perhaps, which wrapped the destined apostle on his road to Damascus. Yet that light blinded for a season; but hers poured celestial vision upon the brain, so that her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review.

This anecdote was treated skeptically at the time by some critics; but besides that it has since been confirmed by other experience essentially the same, reported by other parties in the same circumstances, who had never heard of each other, the true point for astonishment is not the simultaneity of arrangement under which the past events of life, though in fact successive, had formed their dread line of revelation. This was but a secondary phenomenon: the deeper lay in the resurrection itself, and the possibility of resurrection, for what had so long slept in the dust. A pall, deep as oblivion, had been thrown by life over every trace of these experiences; and yet suddenly, at a silent command, at the signal of a blazing rocket sent up from the brain, the pall draws up, and the whole depths of the theater are exposed. Here was the greater mystery. Now, this mystery is liable to no doubt; for it is repeated, and ten thousand times repeated, by opium, for those who are its martyrs.

Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can revive in strength: they are not dead, but sleeping. In the illustration imagined by myself from the case of some individual palimpsest, the Grecian tragedy had seemed to be displaced, but was not displaced, by the monkish legend; and the monkish legend had seemed to be displaced, but was not displaced, by the knightly romance. In some potent convulsion of the system, all wheels back into its earliest elementary stage. The bewildering romance, light tarnished with darkness, the semi-fabulous legend, truth celestial mixed with human falsehoods, these fade even of themselves as life advances. The romance has perished that the young man adored; the legend has gone that deluded the boy: but the deep, deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child's hands were unlinked for ever from his mother's neck, or his lips for ever from his sister's kisses, - these

remain lurking below all; and these lurk to the last. Alchemy there is none of passion or disease that can scorch away these immortal impresses; and the dream which closed the preceding section, together with the succeeding dreams of this (which may be viewed as in the nature of choruses winding up the overture contained in Part I.), are but illustrations of this truth, such as every man, probably, will meet experimentally, who passes through similar convulsions of dreaming or delirium from any similar or equal disturbance in his nature.*

CHARLES LAMB.

1775-1835.

Humorous, witty, genial; essayist and critic; author of "Essays by Elia," "John Woodvil," "Tales founded on the Plays of Shakspeare," and a few poems.

A QUAKERS' MEETING.

"Still-born Silence! thou that art

Floodgate of the deeper heart!

Offspring of a heavenly kind!

Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind!

Secrecy's confidant, 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!"†

READER, wouldst thou know what true peace and quiet mean; wouldst thou find a refuge from the noises and clamors of the multitude; wouldst thou enjoy at once solitude and society; wouldst thou possess the depth of thine own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species; wouldst thou be alone, and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not

*This, it may be said, requires a corresponding duration of experience; but, as an argument for this mysterious power lurking in our nature, I may remind the reader of one phenomenon open to the notice of everybody; namely, the tendency of very aged persons to throw back and concentrate the light of their memory upon scenes of early childhood, as to which they recall many traces that had faded even to themselves in middle life, whilst they often forget altogether the whole intermediate stages of their experience. This shows that naturally, and without violent agencies, the human brain is by tendency a palimpsest.

From Poems of all Sorts, by Richard Flecknoe, 1653.

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 thine ears, with littlefaithed, 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 . 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 can not 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-hunting 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,

Dropped from the ruined sides of kings;"

but 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 moldering 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, naught - 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 sowing 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 sat betwixt the fires of two persecutions, - the outcast and offscouring 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 amid lambs. And I remember 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."

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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 byword 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

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