The Quiet Days at Dublin: 'Abdu'l-Bahá Among the New Hampshire Hills

In the middle weeks of the 1912 American journey, the demands of the East Coast cities — the daily talks, the press of visitors, the heat of late July — had begun to tell on the Master. Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání records that the household sought a place where He might pause, dictate the Tablets that had accumulated, and breathe the air of the hills.

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The choice fell on Dublin, New Hampshire. The little town in the shadow of Mount Monadnock had become, by 1912, an artists' and writers' summer colony. Painters, novelists, and Boston families of means had built simple cottages along the lake. The Master took rooms there for several weeks.

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The diary records the rhythm of those days as the most measured of the entire tour. Mornings were given to correspondence: Tablets to Persia, replies to American believers, dictation that Maḥmúd transcribed at the table. After the noon meal the Master would walk — sometimes alone, sometimes with one or two of the party — among the pines and along the lake shore. He spoke of the air as carrying the freshness of the mountains and of the silence as a great mercy.

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The afternoons brought visitors. The summer residents had heard that an unusual Eastern guest was lodging in their hills, and they came: Episcopal clergymen, Boston society women, painters who arrived in their work clothes, a few children sent by their parents to see what they could see. Mahmúd records that the Master received every one of them. The talks delivered in the Dublin parlour were less formal than those in the New York churches; they often turned on the simple subjects of family life, the education of children, the duties of the soul.

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In the evenings the Master would sit on the porch as the light fell. The diary preserves Him there in a few sentences: a man of nearly seventy, in a white robe, watching the sun lower over the New Hampshire hills, the pines darkening. He spoke very little in those evening hours. The friends who joined Him sat quietly, as if conscious that the silence was itself the teaching.

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When the household at last packed to return to the cities, Maḥmúd records the Master saying that the days at Dublin had been a rest the rest of the journey would draw on.

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*Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entries for July 23 to August 16, 1912; see original for full text.*

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