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.
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