g-doer as well as the sufferer underlies all. They aim to
convince the judgment and reach the heart without awakening prejudice and
passion. To the slave-holders of his time they must have seemed like the
voice of conscience speaking to them in the cool of the day. One feels,
in reading them, the tenderness and humility of a nature redeemed from
all pride of opinion and self-righteousness, sinking itself out of sight,
and intent only upon rendering smaller the sum of human sorrow and sin by
drawing men nearer to God, and to each other. The style is that of a man
unlettered, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness,
the purity of whose heart enters into his language. There is no attempt
at fine writing, not a word or phrase for effect; it is the simple
unadorned diction of one to whom the temptations of the pen seem to have
been wholly unknown. He wrote, as he believed, from an inward spiritual
prompting; and with all his unaffected humility he evidently felt that
his work was done in the clear radiance of

"The light which never was on land or sea."

It was not for him to outrun his Guide, or, as Sir Thomas Browne
expresses it, to "order the finger of the Almighty to His will and
pleasure, but to sit still under the soft showers of Providence." Very
wise are these essays, but their wisdom is not altogether that of this
world. They lead one away from all the jealousies, strifes, and
competitions of luxury, fashion, and gain, out of the close air of
parties and sects, into a region of calmness,--

"The haunt
Of every gentle wind whose breath can teach
The wild to love tranquillity,"--

a quiet habitation where all things are ordered in what he calls "the
pure reason;" a rest from all self-seeking, and where no man's interest
or activity conflicts with that of another. Beauty they certainly have,
but it is not that which the rules of art recognize; a certain
indefinable purity pervades them, making one sensible, as he reads, of a
sweetness as of violets. "The secret of Woolman's purity of style," said
Dr. Channing, "is that his eye was single, and that conscience dictated
his words."

Of course we are not to look to the writings of such a man for tricks of
rhetoric, the free play of imagination, or the unscrupulousness of
epigram and antithesis. He wrote as he lived, conscious of "the great
Task-master's eye." With the wise heath