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.