h warm commendation. Edward
Irving pronounced it a godsend. Some idea of the lively interest which
the fine literary circle gathered around the hearth of Lamb felt in the
beautiful simplicity of Woolman's pages may be had from the Diary of
Henry Crabb Robinson, one of their number, himself a man of wide and
varied culture, the intimate friend of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.
In his notes for First Month, 1824, he says, after a reference to a
sermon of his friend Irving, which he feared would deter rather than
promote belief:

"How different this from John Woolman's Journal I have been reading at
the same time! A perfect gem! His is a _schone Seele_, a beautiful
soul. An illiterate tailor, he writes in a style of the most exquisite
purity and grace. His moral qualities are transferred to his writings.
Had he not been so very humble, he would have written a still better
book; for, fearing to indulge in vanity, he conceals the events in which
he was a great actor. His religion was love. His whole existence and
all his passions were love. If one could venture to impute to his creed,
and not to his personal character, the delightful frame of mind he
exhibited, one could not hesitate to be a convert. His Christianity is
most inviting, it is fascinating! One of the leading British reviews a
few years ago, referring to this Journal, pronounced its author the man
who, in all the centuries since the advent of Christ, lived nearest to
the Divine pattern. The author of The Patience of Hope, whose authority
in devotional literature is unquestioned, says of him: 'John Woolman's
gift was love, a charity of which it does not enter into the natural
heart of man to conceive, and of which the more ordinary experiences,
even of renewed nature, give but a faint shadow. Every now and then, in
the world's history, we meet with such men, the kings and priests of
Humanity, on whose heads this precious ointment has been so poured forth
that it has run down to the skirts of their clothing, and extended over
the whole of the visible creation; men who have entered, like Francis of
Assisi, into the secret of that deep amity with God and with His
creatures which makes man to be in league with the stones of the field,
and the beasts of the field to be at peace with him. In this pure,
universal charity there is nothing fitful or intermittent, nothing that
comes and goes in showers and gleams and sunbursts. Its springs are deep
and c