The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a shattered granite
bowlder, or heap of bowlders, with an irregular outline and many
fissures, out of which sprang shrubs, bushes, and even trees; as if the
scanty soil within those crevices were sweeter to their roots than any
other earth. At the base of the pulpit, the broken bowlders inclined
towards each other, so as to form a shallow cave, within which our
little party had sometimes found protection from a summer shower. On
the threshold, or just across it, grew a tuft of pale columbines, in
their season, and violets, sad and shadowy recluses, such as Priscilla
was when we first knew her; children of the sun, who had never seen
their father, but dwelt among damp mosses, though not akin to them. At
the summit, the rock was overshadowed by the canopy of a birch-tree,
which served as a sounding-board for the pulpit. Beneath this shade
(with my eyes of sense half shut and those of the imagination widely
opened) I used to see the holy Apostle of the Indians, with the
sunlight flickering down upon him through the leaves, and glorifying
his figure as with the half-perceptible glow of a transfiguration.
I the more minutely describe the rock, and this little Sabbath
solitude, because Hollingsworth, at our solicitation, often ascended
Eliot's pulpit, and not exactly preached, but talked to us, his few
disciples, in a strain that rose and fell as naturally as the wind's
breath among the leaves of the birch-tree. No other speech of man has
ever moved me like some of those discourses. It seemed most pitiful--a
positive calamity to the world--that a treasury of golden thoughts
should thus be scattered, by the liberal handful, down among us three,
when a thousand hearers might have been the richer for them; and
Hollingsworth the richer, likewise, by the sympathy of multitudes.
After speaking much or little, as might happen, he would descend from
his gray pulpit, and generally fling himself at full length on the
ground, face downward. Meanwhile, we talked around him on such topics
as were suggested by the discourse.
Since her interview with Westervelt, Zenobia's continual inequalities
of temper had been rather difficult for her friends to bear. On the
first Sunday after that incident, when Hollingsworth had clambered down
from Eliot's pulpit, she declaimed with great earnestness and passion,
nothing short of anger, on the injustice which the world did to women,
and equally to itself, by not allowing them, in freedom and honor, and
with the fullest welcome, their natural utterance in public.
"It shall not always be so!" cried she. "If I live another year, I
will lift up my own voice in behalf of woman's wider liberty!"