othing 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 wi