University of Virginia Library

14. XIV.
ELIOT'S PULPIT.

Our Sundays, at Blithedale, were not ordinarily kept
with such rigid observance as might have befitted the
descendants of the Pilgrims, whose high enterprise, as we
sometimes flattered ourselves, we had taken up, and were
carrying it onward and aloft, to a point which they never
dreamed of attaining.

On that hallowed day, it is true, we rested from our
labors. Our oxen, relieved from their week-day yoke,
roamed at large through the pasture; each yoke-fellow,
however, keeping close beside his mate, and continuing
to acknowledge, from the force of habit and sluggish
sympathy, the union which the taskmaster had imposed
for his own hard ends. As for us human yoke-fellows,
chosen companions of toil, whose hoes had clinked
together throughout the week, we wandered off, in various
directions, to enjoy our interval of repose. Some, I
believe, went devoutly to the village church. Others, it
may be, ascended a city or a country pulpit, wearing the
clerical robe with so much dignity that you would
scarcely have suspected the yeoman's frock to have been
flung off only since milking-time. Others took long
rambles among the rustic lanes and by-paths, pausing to
look at black old farm-houses, with their sloping roofs;
and at the modern cottage, so like a plaything that it
seemed as if real joy or sorrow could have no scope

within; and at the more pretending villa, with its range
of wooden columns, supporting the needless insolence of
a great portico. Some betook themselves into the wide,
dusky barn, and lay there for hours together on the
odorous hay; while the sunstreaks and the shadows
strove together, — these to make the barn solemn, those
to make it cheerful, — and both were conquerors; and
the swallows twittered a cheery anthem, flashing into
sight, or vanishing, as they darted to and fro among the
golden rules of sunshine. And others went a little way
into the woods, and threw themselves on mother earth,
pillowing their heads on a heap of moss, the green decay
of an old log; and, dropping asleep, the humble-bees
and mosquitoes sung and buzzed about their ears, causing
the slumberers to twitch and start, without awakening.

With Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla and myself, it
grew to be a custom to spend the Sabbath afternoon at a
certain rock. It was known to us under the name of
Eliot's pulpit, from a tradition that the venerable Apostle
Eliot had preached there, two centuries gone by, to an
Indian auditory. The old pine forest, through which the
apostle's voice was wont to sound, had fallen, an immemorial
time ago. But the soil, being of the rudest and
most broken surface, had apparently never been brought
under tillage; other growths, maple, and beech, and
birch, had succeeded to the primeval trees; so that it
was still as wild a tract of woodland as the great-great-great-great-grandson
of one of Eliot's Indians (had any
such posterity been in existence) could have desired,
for the site and shelter of his wigwam. These aftergrowths,
indeed, lose the stately solemnity of the original

forest. If left in due neglect, however, they run into an
entanglement of softer wildness, among the rustling
leaves of which the sun can scatter cheerfulness as it
never could among the dark-browed pines.

The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a shattered
granite boulder, or heap of boulders, 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
boulders 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!”

She, perhaps, saw me smile.

“What matter of ridicule do you find in this, Miles
Coverdale?” exclaimed Zenobia, with a flash of anger
in her eyes. “That smile, permit me to say, makes me
suspicious of a low tone of feeling and shallow thought.
It is my belief — yes, and my prophecy, should I die
before it happens — that, when my sex shall achieve its
rights, there will be ten eloquent women where there is

now one eloquent man. Thus far, no woman in the
world has ever once spoken out her whole heart and
her whole mind. The mistrust and disapproval of the
vast bulk of society throttles us, as with two gigantic
hands at our throats! We mumble a few weak words,
and leave a thousand better ones unsaid. You let us
write a little, it is true, on a limited range of subjects.
But the pen is not for woman. Her power is too natural
and immediate. It is with the living voice alone that
she can compel the world to recognize the light of her
intellect and the depth of her heart!”

Now, — though I could not well say so to Zenobia, —
I had not smiled from any unworthy estimate of woman,
or in denial of the claims which she is beginning to
put forth. What amused and puzzled me was the fact,
that women, however intellectually superior, so seldom
disquiet themselves about the rights or wrongs of their
sex, unless their own individual affections chance to lie
in idleness, or to be ill at ease. They are not natural
reformers, but become such by the pressure of exceptional
misfortune. I could measure Zenobia's inward
trouble by the animosity with which she now took up
the general quarrel of woman against man.

“I will give you leave, Zenobia,” replied I, “to fling
your utmost scorn upon me, if you ever hear me utter a
sentiment unfavorable to the widest liberty which woman
has yet dreamed of. I would give her all she asks, and
add a great deal more, which she will not be the party
to demand, but which men, if they were generous and
wise, would grant of their own free motion. For
instance, I should love dearly, — for the next thousand
years, at least, — to have all government devolve into

the hands of women. I hate to be ruled by my own
sex; it excites my jealousy, and wounds my pride. It
is the iron sway of bodily force which abases us, in our
compelled submission. But how sweet the free, generous
courtesy, with which I would kneel before a
woman-ruler!”

“Yes, if she were young and beautiful,” said Zenobia,
laughing. “But how if she were sixty, and a
fright?”

“Ah! it is you that rate womanhood low,” said I.
“But let me go on. I have never found it possible to
suffer a bearded priest so near my heart and conscience
as to do me any spiritual good. I blush at the very
thought! O, in the better order of things, Heaven grant
that the ministry of souls may be left in charge of
women! The gates of the Blessed City will be
thronged with the multitude that enter in, when that
day comes! The task belongs to woman. God meant
it for her. He has endowed her with the religious sentiment
in its utmost depth and purity, refined from that
gross, intellectual alloy with which every masculine
theologist — save only One, who merely veiled himself
in mortal and masculine shape, but was, in truth, divine
— has been prone to mingle it. I have always envied
the Catholics their faith in that sweet, sacred Virgin
Mother, who stands between them and the Deity, intercepting
somewhat of his awful splendor, but permitting
his love to stream upon the worshipper more intelligibly
to human comprehension through the medium of a
woman's tenderness. Have I not said enough, Zenobia?”

“I cannot think that this is true,” observed Priscilla,

who had been gazing at me with great, disapproving
eyes. “And I am sure I do not wish it to be true!”

“Poor child!” exclaimed Zenobia, rather contemptuously.
“She is the type of womanhood, such as man
has spent centuries in making it. He is never content,
unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards what
he loves. In denying us our rights, he betrays even
more blindness to his own interests than profligate disregard
of ours!”

“Is this true?” asked Priscilla, with simplicity, turning
to Hollingsworth. “Is it all true, that Mr. Coverdale
and Zenobia have been saying?”

“No, Priscilla!” answered Hollingsworth, with his
customary bluntness. “They have neither of them
spoken one true word yet.”

“Do you despise woman?” said Zenobia. “Ah,
Hollingsworth, that would be most ungrateful!”

“Despise her? No!” cried Hollingsworth, lifting his
great shaggy head and shaking it at us, while his eyes
glowed almost fiercely. “She is the most admirable
handiwork of God, in her true place and character.
Her place is at man's side. Her office, that of the sympathizer;
the unreserved, unquestioning believer; the
recognition, withheld in every other manner, but given,
in pity, through woman's heart, lest man should utterly
lose faith in himself; the echo of God's own voice, pronouncing,
`It is well done!' All the separate action
of woman is, and ever has been, and always shall be,
false, foolish, vain, destructive of her own best and
holiest qualities, void of every good effect, and productive
of intolerable mischiefs! Man is a wretch without
woman; but woman is a monster — and, thank Heaven,

an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster —
without man as her acknowledged principal! As true
as I had once a mother whom I loved, were there any
possible prospect of woman's taking the social stand
which some of them — poor, miserable, abortive creatures,
who only dream of such things because they have
missed woman's peculiar happiness, or because nature
made them really neither man nor woman! — if there
were a chance of their attaining the end which these
petticoated monstrosities have in view, I would call upon
my own sex to use its physical force, that unmistakable
evidence of sovereignty, to scourge them back within
their proper bounds! But it will not be needful. The
heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere
is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!”

Never was mortal blessed — if blessing it were — with
a glance of such entire acquiescence and unquestioning
faith, happy in its completeness, as our little Priscilla
unconsciously bestowed on Hollingsworth. She seemed
to take the sentiment from his lips into her heart, and
brood over it in perfect content. The very woman
whom he pictured — the gentle parasite, the soft reflection
of a more powerful existence — sat there at his feet.

I looked at Zenobia, however, fully expecting her to
resent — as I felt, by the indignant ebullition of my own
blood, that she ought — this outrageous affirmation of
what struck me as the intensity of masculine egotism.
It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of
her very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to
make it a mere incident in the great sum of man.
Hollingsworth had boldly uttered what he, and millions
of despots like him, really felt. Without intending it,

he had disclosed the well-spring of all these troubled
waters. Now, if ever, it surely behooved Zenobia to be
the champion of her sex.

But, to my surprise, and indignation too, she only
looked humbled. Some tears sparkled in her eyes, but
they were wholly of grief, not anger.

“Well, be it so,” was all she said. “I, at least,
have deep cause to think you right. Let man be but
manly and god-like, and woman is only too ready to
become to him what you say!”

I smiled — somewhat bitterly, it is true — in contemplation
of my own ill-luck. How little did these two
women care for me, who had freely conceded all their
claims, and a great deal more, out of the fulness of my
heart; while Hollingsworth, by some necromancy of his
horrible injustice, seemed to have brought them both to
his feet!

“Women almost invariably behave thus,” thought I.
“What does the fact mean? Is it their nature? Or is
it, at last, the result of ages of compelled degradation?
And, in either case, will it be possible ever to redeem
them?

An intuition now appeared to possess all the party,
that, for this time, at least, there was no more to be
said. With one accord, we arose from the ground, and
made our way through the tangled undergrowth towards
one of those pleasant wood-paths that wound among the
over-arching trees. Some of the branches hung so low
as partly to conceal the figures that went before from
those who followed. Priscilla had leaped up more
lightly than the rest of us, and ran along in advance,
with as much airy activity of spirit as was typified in

the motion of a bird, which chanced to be flitting from
tree to tree, in the same direction as herself. Never did
she seem so happy as that afternoon. She skipt, and
could not help it, from very playfulness of heart.

Zenobia and Hollingsworth went next, in close contiguity,
but not with arm in arm. Now, just when they
had passed the impending bough of a birch-tree, I
plainly saw Zenobia take the hand of Hollingsworth in
both her own, press it to her bosom, and let it fall
again!

The gesture was sudden, and full of passion; the
impulse had evidently taken her by surprise; it expressed
all! Had Zenobia knelt before him, or flung herself
upon his breast, and gasped out, “I love you, Hollingsworth!”
I could not have been more certain of what it
meant. They then walked onward, as before. But,
methought, as the declining sun threw Zenobia's magnified
shadow along the path, I beheld it tremulous; and
the delicate stem of the flower which she wore in her
hair was likewise responsive to her agitation.

Priscilla — through the medium of her eyes, at least
— could not possibly have been aware of the gesture
above described. Yet, at that instant, I saw her droop.
The buoyancy, which just before had been so bird-like,
was utterly departed; the life seemed to pass out of her,
and even the substance of her figure to grow thin and
gray. I almost imagined her a shadow, fading gradually
into the dimness of the wood. Her pace became
so slow, that Hollingsworth and Zenobia passed by, and
I, without hastening my footsteps, overtook her.

“Come, Priscilla,” said I, looking her intently in the
face, which was very pale and sorrowful, “we must

make haste after our friends. Do you feel suddenly ill?
A moment ago, you flitted along so lightly that I was
comparing you to a bird. Now, on the contrary, it is as
if you had a heavy heart, and very little strength to bear
it with. Pray take my arm!”

“No,” said Priscilla, “I do not think it would help
me. It is my heart, as you say, that makes me heavy;
and I know not why. Just now, I felt very happy.”

No doubt it was a kind of sacrilege in me to attempt
to come within her maidenly mystery; but, as she
appeared to be tossed aside by her other friends, or carelessly
let fall, like a flower which they had done with, I
could not resist the impulse to take just one peep beneath
her folded petals.

“Zenobia and yourself are dear friends, of late,” I
remarked. “At first, — that first evening when you
came to us, — she did not receive you quite so warmly
as might have been wished.”

“I remember it,” said Priscilla. “No wonder she
hesitated to love me, who was then a stranger to her,
and a girl of no grace or beauty, — she being herself so
beautiful!”

“But she loves you now, of course?” suggested I.
“And at this very instant you feel her to be your dearest
friend?”

“Why do you ask me that question?” exclaimed
Priscilla, as if frightened at the scrutiny into her feelings
which I compelled her to make. “It somehow puts
strange thoughts into my mind. But I do love Zenobia
dearly! If she only loves me half as well, I shall be
happy!”

“How is it possible to doubt that, Priscilla?” I rejoined.

“But observe how pleasantly and happily
Zenobia and Hollingsworth are walking together. I
call it a delightful spectacle. It truly rejoices me that
Hollingsworth has found so fit and affectionate a friend!
So many people in the world mistrust him, — so many
disbelieve and ridicule, while hardly any do him justice,
or acknowledge him for the wonderful man he is, — that
it is really a blessed thing for him to have won the sympathy
of such a woman as Zenobia. Any man might
be proud of that. Any man, even if he be as great as
Hollingsworth, might love so magnificent a woman.
How very beautiful Zenobia is! And Hollingsworth
knows it, too.”

There may have been some petty malice in what I
said. Generosity is a very fine thing, at a proper time,
and within due limits. But it is an insufferable bore to
see one man engrossing every thought of all the women,
and leaving his friend to shiver in outer seclusion, without
even the alternative of solacing himself with what
the more fortunate individual has rejected. Yes; it was
out of a foolish bitterness of heart that I had spoken.

“Go on before,” said Priscilla, abruptly, and with
true feminine imperiousness, which heretofore I had
never seen her exercise. “It pleases me best to loiter
along by myself. I do not walk so fast as you.”

With her hand, she made a little gesture of dismissal.
It provoked me; yet, on the whole, was the most bewitching
thing that Priscilla had ever done. I obeyed
her, and strolled moodily homeward, wondering — as I
had wondered a thousand times already — how Hollingsworth
meant to dispose of these two hearts, which
(plainly to my perception, and, as I could not but now

suppose, to his) he had engrossed into his own huge
egotism.

There was likewise another subject hardly less fruitful
of speculation. In what attitude did Zenobia present
herself to Hollingsworth? Was it in that of a free
woman, with no mortgage on her affections nor claimant
to her hand, but fully at liberty to surrender both, in
exchange for the heart and hand which she apparently
expected to receive? But was it a vision that I had
witnessed in the wood? Was Westervelt a goblin?
Were those words of passion and agony, which Zenobia
had uttered in my hearing, a mere stage declamation?
Were they formed of a material lighter than common
air? Or, supposing them to bear sterling weight, was
it not a perilous and dreadful wrong which she was
meditating towards herself and Hollingsworth?

Arriving nearly at the farm-house, I looked back over
the long slope of pasture-land, and beheld them standing
together, in the light of sunset, just on the spot where,
according to the gossip of the Community, they meant
to build their cottage. Priscilla, alone and forgotten,
was lingering in the shadow of the wood.