It has been reported to eye by Ute Caspars, German YM, that our 'dear ancestor William Penn appears with a kind of foreword to the new Harry Potter? Even in a bookshop in Northern Germany (run by a Friend) this was noticed. Unfortunately, although we surely understood the sense of it, with our limited English we would not be able to translate the whole of it. The second sentence goes in two parts against the grammar we have been taught. Or should there be a printing error? Here I copy the quote exactly as we found it in the book':

Death is but crossing the world as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be sad to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.
William Penn,
More Fruits of Solitude

Labels: harry potter