These after-growths, 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
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.
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