Where'er thou sail'st who sailed with me,
Though now thou climbest loftier mounts,
And fairer rivers dost ascend,
Be thou my Muse, my Brother--.
I am bound, I am bound, for a distant shore,
By a lonely isle, by a far Azore,
There it is, there it is, the treasure I seek,
On the barren sands of a desolate creek.
I sailed up a river with a pleasant wind,
New lands, new people, and new thoughts to find;
Many fair reaches and headlands appeared,
And many dangers were there to be feared;
But when I remember where I have been,
And the fair landscapes that I have seen,
^Thou^ seemest the only permanent shore,
The cape never rounded, nor wandered o'er.
Fluminaque obliquis cinxit declivia ripis;
Quae, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa;
In mare perveniunt partim, campoque recepta
Liberioris aquae, pro ripis litora pulsant.
Ovid, Met. I. 39
He confined the rivers within their sloping banks,
Which in different places are part absorbed by the earth,
Part reach the sea, and being received within the plain
Of its freer waters, beat the shore for banks.
CONCORD RIVER.
"Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw,
Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies,
Here, in pine houses, built of new-fallen trees,
Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell."
Emerson.
The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably
as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have
a place in civilized history, until the fame of its grassy
meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in
1635, when it received the other but kindred name of Con-
cord from the first plantation on its banks, which appears
to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and har-
mony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass
grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River
only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. To an
extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted and
fished, and it is still perennial grass-ground to Concord
farmers, who own the Great Meadows, and get the hay
from year to year. "One branch of it," according to the
Historian of Concord, for I love to quote so good author-
ity, "rises in the south part of Hopkinton, and another
from a pond and a large cedar swamp in Westborough," and
flowing between Hopkinton and Southborough, through Framing-
ham, and between Sudbury and Way] and, where it is sometimes
called Sudbury river, it enters Concord at the south part
of the town, and after receiving the North or Assabeth
river, which has its source a little further to the north
and west, goes out at the north-east angle, and flowing
between Bedford and Carlisle, and through Billerica, empties
into the Merrimack at Lowell. In Concord it is, in summer,
from four to fifteen feet deep, and from one hundred to
three hundred feet wide, but in the spring freshets, when
it overflows its banks, it is in some places nearly a mile
wide. Between Sudbury and Wayland the meadows acquire
their greatest breadth, and when covered with water, they
form a handsome chain of shallow vernal lakes, resorted to
by numerous gulls and ducks. Just above Sherman's Bridge,
between these towns, is the largest expanse, and when
the wind blows freshly in a raw March day, heaving up
the surface into dark and sober billows or regular swells,
skirted as it is in the distance with alder swamps and
smoke-like maples, it looks like a smaller Lake Huron,
and is very pleasant and exciting for a landsman to
row or sail over. The farm-houses along the Sudbury
shore, which rises gently to a considerable height, com-
mand fine water prospects at this season. The shore is
more flat on the Wayland side, and this town is the
greatest loser by the flood. Its farmers tell me that
thousands of acres are flooded now, since the dams have
been erected, where they remember to have seen the white
honeysuckle or clover growing once, and they could go
dry with shoes only in summer. Now there is nothing but
blue-joint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing in
water all the year round. For a long time, they made
the most of the driest season to get their hay, working
sometimes till nine o'clock at night, sedulously paring
with their scythes in the twilight round the hummocks
left by the ice; but now it is not worth the getting,
when they can come at it, and they look sadly round
to their wood-lots and upland as a last resource.
It is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream,
if you go no farther than Sudbury, only to see how much
country there is in the rear of us; great hills, and a hun-
dred brooks, and farm-houses, and barns, and hay-stacks,
you never saw before, and men every where, Sudbury,
that is Southborough men, and Wayland, and Nine-Acre-
Corner men, and Bound Rock, where four towns bound
on a rock in the river, Lincoln, Wayland, Sudbury,
Concord. Many waves are there agitated by the wind,
keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face,
reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the hundred, all un-
easy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and
now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers
straight for Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with
reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their
paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre
you before they leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead,
muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, with no
fire to warm them by that you know of; their labored
homes rising here and there like hay-stacks; and count-
less mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny
windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves and heav-
ing up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating
about among the alders; — such healthy natural tumult
as proves the last day is not yet at hand. And there
stand all around the alders, and birches, and oaks, and
maples full of glee and sap, holding in their buds un-
til the waters subside. You shall perhaps run aground on
Cranberry Island, only some spires of last year's pipe-
grass above water, to show where the danger is, and get
as good a freezing there as any where on the North-west
Coast. I never voyaged so far in all my life. You shall
see men you never heard of before, whose names you
don't know, going away down through the meadows with
long ducking guns, with water-tight boots, wading through
the fowl-meadow grass, on bleak, wintry, distant shores,
with guns at half cock, and they shall see teal, blue-
winged, green-winged, shelldrakes, whistlers, black ducks,
ospreys, and many other wild and noble sights before
night, such as they who sit in parlors never dream of.
You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men,
keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer's wood,
or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and
rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a
chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in '75 and
1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater
men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakspeare, only they
never got time to say so; they never took to the way
of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they
might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or
what have they not written on the face of the earth
already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and har-
rowing, and plowing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out
and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing
what they had already written for want of parchment.
As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the
work of to-day is present, so some flitting perspectives,
and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are
in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, peren-
nial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never
die.
The respectable folks,--
Where dwell they?
They whisper in the oaks,
And they sigh in the hay;
Summer and winter, night and day,
Out on the meadow, there dwell they.
They never die,
Nor snivel, nor cry,
Nor ask our pity
With a wet eye.
A sound estate they ever mend
To every asker readily lend;
To the ocean wealth,
To the meadow health,
To Time his length,
To the rocks strength,
To the stars light,
To the weary night,
To the busy day,
To the idle play;
And so their good cheer never ends,
For all are their debtors, and all their friends.
Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its
current, which is scarcely perceptible, and some have re-
ferred to its influence the proverbial moderation of the
inhabitants of Concord, as exhibited in the Revolution,
and on later occasions. It has been proposed, that the
town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant,
with the Concord circling nine times round. I have read that
a descent of an eighth of an inch in a mile is suffici-
ent to produce a flow. Our river has, probably, very near
the smallest allowance. The story is current, at any rate,
though I believe that strict history will not bear it out,
that the only bridge ever carried away on the main branch,
within the limits of the town, was driven up stream by
the wind. But wherever it makes a sudden bend it is
shallower and swifter, and asserts its title to be called
a river. Compared with the other tributaries of the Mer-
rimack, it appears to have been properly named Muske-
taquid, or Meadow River, by the Indians. For the most
part, it creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scat-
tered oaks, where the cranberry is found in abundance,
covering the ground like a moss-bed. A row of sunken
dwarf willows borders the stream on one or both sides,
while at a greater distance the meadow is skirted with
maples, alders, and other fluviatile trees, overrun with the
grape vine, which bears fruit in its season, purple, red,
white, and other grapes. Still further from the stream,
on the edge of the firm land, are seen the gray and white
dwellings of the inhabitants. According to the valuation
of 1831, there were in Concord two thousand one hundred
and eleven acres, or about one-seventh of the whole ter-
ritory, in meadow; this standing next in the list after
pasturage and unimproved lands, and, judging from the
returns of previous years, the meadow is not reclaimed
so fast as the woods are cleared.
The sluggish artery of the Concord meadows steals
thus unobserved through the town, without a murmur or
a pulse-beat, its general course from south-west to north-
east, and its length about fifty miles; a huge volume of
matter, ceaselessly rolling through the plains and valleys
of the substantial earth, with the moccasined tread of an
Indian warrior, making haste from the high places of the
earth to its ancient reservoir. The murmurs of many a
famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to
us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banks; many a
poet's stream floating the helms and shields of heroes on
its bosom. The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere
dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by
the everflowing springs of fame; —
"And thou Simois, that as an arrowe, clere
Through Troy rennest, aie downward to the sea";--
and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy
but much abused Concord River with the most famous in
history.
"Sure there are poets which did never dream
Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream
Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose
Those made not poets, but the poets those."
The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile, those jour-
neying atoms from the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh,
and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal
importance in the annals of the world. The heavens are
not yet drained over their sources, but the Mountains of
the Moon still send their annual tribute to the Pasha
without fail, as they did to the Pharaohs, though he must
collect the rest of his revenue at the point of the
sword. Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the
footsteps of the first travellers. They are the constant
lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise
and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on
their banks will at length accompany their currents to the
lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the
interior of continents. They are the natural highways of
all nations, not only levelling the ground, and removing ob-
stacles from the path of the traveller, quenching his
thirst, and bearing him on their bosoms, but conducting him
through the most interesting scenery, the most populous
portions of the globe, and where the animal and vegetable
kingdoms attain their greatest perfection.
I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watch-
ing the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress,
following the same law with the system, with time, and
all that is made; the weeds at the bottom gently bending
down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, still planted
where their seeds had sunk, but ere long to die and go
down likewise; the shining pebbles, not yet anxious to
better their condition, the chips and weeds, and occa-
sional logs and stems of trees, that floated past, fulfilling
their fate, were objects of singular interest to me, and at
last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom, and float
whither it would bear me.
SATURDAY.
"Come, come, my lovely fair, and let us try
Those rural delicacies."
Christ's Invitation to the Soul. Quarles
At length, on Saturday, the last day of August, 1839,
we two, brothers, and natives of Concord, weighed an-
chor in this river port; for Concord, too, lies under the
sun, a port of entry and departure for the bodies as well
as the souls of men; one shore at least exempted from
all duties but such as an honest man will gladly discharge.
A warm drizzling rain had obscured the morning, and
threatened to delay our voyage, but at length the leaves
and grass were dried, and it came out a mild afternoon,
as serene and fresh as if nature were maturing some
greater scheme of her own. After this long dripping and
oozing from every pore, she began to respire again more
healthily than ever. So with a vigorous shove we launched
our boat from the bank, while the flags and bull-rushes
curtseyed a God-speed, and dropped silently down the
stream.
Our boat, which had cost us a week's labor in the
spring, was in form like a fisherman's dory, fifteen feet
long by three and a half in breadth at the widest part,
painted green below, with a border of blue, with refer-
ence to the two elements in which it was to spend its
existence. It had been loaded the evening before at our
door, half a mile from the river, with potatoes and melons
from a patch which we had cultivated, and a few utensils,
and was provided with wheels in order to be rolled around
falls, as well as with two sets of oars, and several slender
poles for shoving in shallow places, and also two masts,
one of which served for a tent-pole at night; for a buffalo
skin was to be our bed, and a tent of cotton cloth our
roof. It was strongly built but heavy, and hardly of better
model than usual. If rightly made, a boat would be a
sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements,
related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely
fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful
bird. The fish shows where there should be the greatest
breadth of beam and depth in the hold; its fins direct
where to set the oars, and the tail gives some hint for
the form and position of the rudder. The bird shows how to
rig and trim the sails, and what form to give to the prow
that it may balance the boat, and divide the air and water
best. These hints we had but partially obeyed. But the
eyes, though they are no sailors, will never be satisfied
with any model, however fashionable, which does not an-
swer all the requisitions of art. However, as art is all of
a ship but the wood, and yet the wood alone will rudely
serve the purpose of a ship, so our boat being of wood
gladly availed itself of the old law that the heavier shall
float the lighter, and though a dull water fowl, proved a
sufficient buoy for our purpose.
"Were it the will of Heaven, an osier bough
Were vessel safe enough the seas to plow."
Some village friends stood upon a promontory lower
down the stream to wave us a last farewell; but we,
having already performed these shore rites, with excusable
reserve, as befits those who are embarked on unusual en-
terprises, who behold but speak not, silently glided past
the firm lands of Concord, both peopled cape and lonely
summer meadow with steady sweeps. And yet we did unbend
so far as to let our guns speak for us, when at length
we had swept out of sight, and thus left the woods to
ring again with their echoes; and it may be many russet-
clad children lurking in those broad meadows, with the
bittern and the woodcock and the rail, though wholly con-
cealed by brakes and hardhack and meadow-sweet, heard
our salute that afternoon.
We were soon floating past the first regular battle
ground of the Revolution, resting on our oars between
the still visible abutments of that " North Bridge," over
which in April, 1775, rolled the first faint tide of that
war, which ceased not, till, as we read on the stone on
our right, it " gave peace to these United States." As
a Concord poet has sung, —
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
"The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps."
Our reflections had already acquired a historical re-
moteness from the scenes we had left, and we ourselves
essayed to sing.
Ah, 't is in vain the peaceful din
That wakes the ignoble town,
Not thus did braver spirits win
A patriot's renown.
There is one field beside this stream,
Wherein no foot does fall,
But yet it beareth in my dream
A richer crop than all.
Let me believe a dream so dear,
Some heart beat high that day,
Above the petty Province here,
And Britain far away;
Some hero of the ancient mould,
Some arm of knightly worth,
Of strength unbought, and faith unsold,
Honored this spot of earth;
Who sought the prize his heart described,
And did not ask release,
Whose free-born valor was not bribed
By prospect of a peace.
The men who stood on yonder height
That day are long since gone;
Not the same hand directs the fight
And monumental stone.
Ye were the Grecian cities then,
The Romes of modern birth,
Where the New England husbandmen
Have shown a Roman worth.
In vain I search a foreign land
To find our Bunker Hill,
And Lexington and Concord stand
By no Laconian rill.
With such thoughts we swept gently by this now peace-
ful pasture ground, on waves of Concord, in which was
long since drowned the din of war.
But since we sailed
Some things have failed,
And many a dream
Gone down the stream.
Here then an aged shepherd dwelt,
Who to his flock his substance dealt,
And ruled them with a vigorous crook,
By precept of the sacred Book;
But he the pierless bridge passed o'er,
And solitary left the shore.
Anon a youthful pastor came,
Whose crook was not unknown to fame,
His lambs he viewed with gentle glance,
Spread o'er the country's wide expanse,
And fed with " Mosses from the Manse."
Here was our Hawthorne in the dale,
And here the shepherd told his tale.
That slight shaft had now sunk behind the hills, and
we had floated round the neighboring bend, and under the
new North Bridge between Ponkawtasset and the Poplar
Hill, into the Great Meadows, which, like a broad moc-
casin print, have levelled a fertile and juicy place in nature.
On Ponkawtasset, since, with such delay,
Down this still stream we took our meadowy way,
A poet wise has settled, whose fine ray
Doth faintly shine on Concord's twilight day.
Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high,
Shining more brightly as the day goes by,
Most travellers cannot at first descry,
But eyes that wont to range the evening sky,
And know celestial lights, do plainly see,
And gladly hail them, numbering two or three;
For lore that 's deep must deeply studied be,
As from deep wells men read star-poetry.
These stars are never pal'd, though out of sight,
But like the sun they shine forever bright;
Aye, they are suns, though earth must in its flight
Put out its eyes that it may see their light.
Who would neglect the least celestial sound,
Or faintest light that falls on earthly ground,
If he could know it one day would be found
That star in Cygnus whither we are bound,
And pale our sun with heavenly radiance round?
Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to
be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, float-
ing from past to future as silently as one awakes to
fresh morning or evening thoughts. We glided noiselessly
down the stream, occasionally driving a pickerel from the
covert of the pads, or a bream from her nest, and the
smaller bittern now and then sailed away on sluggish wings
from some recess in the shore, or the larger lifted itself
out of the long grass at our approach, and carried its
precious legs away to deposit them in a place of safety.
The tortoises also rapidly dropped into the water, as
our boat ruffled the surface amid the willows breaking
the reflections of the trees. The banks had passed the
height of their beauty, and some of the brighter flowers
showed by their faded tints that the season was verging
towards the afternoon of the year; but this sombre tinge
enhanced their sincerity, and in the still unabated heats
they seemed like the mossy brink of some cool well. The
narrow leaved willow lay along the surface of the water
in masses of light green foliage, interspersed with the
large white balls of the button-bush. The rose-colored
polygonum raised its head proudly above the water on
either hand, and flowering at this season and in these
localities, in the midst of dense fields of the white spe-
cies, which skirted the sides of the stream, its little
streak of red looked very rare and precious. The pure white
blossoms of the arrow-head stood in the shallower parts, and
a few cardinals on the margin still proudly surveyed them-
selves reflected in the water, though the latter, as well
as the pickerel-weed, was now nearly out of blossom. The
snake-head, chelone glabra, grew close to the shore, while
a kind of coreopsis, turning its brazen face to the sun,
full and rank, and a tall dull red flower, eupatorium pnr-
puremn, or trumpet weed, formed the rear rank of the
fluvial array. The bright blue flowers of the soap-wort
gentian were sprinkled here and there in the adjacent
meadows, like flowers which Proserpine had dropped, and
still further in the fields, or higher on the bank, were
seen the Virginian rhexia, and drooping neottia or ladies'-
tresses; while from the more distant waysides, which we
occasionally passed, and banks where the sun had lodged,
was reflected a dull yellow beam from the ranks of tansy,
now in its prime. In short, nature seemed to have adorned
herself for our departure with a profusion of fringes and
curls, mingled with the bright tints of flowers, reflected
in the water. But we missed the white water-lily, which
is the queen of river flowers, its reign being over for
this season. He makes his voyage too late, perhaps, by a
true water clock who delays so long. Many of this spe-
cies inhabit our Concord water. I have passed down the
river before sunrise on a summer morning between fields
of lilies still shut in sleep; and when at length the
flakes of sunlight from over the bank fell on the surface
of the water, whole fields of white blossoms seemed to flash
open before me, as I floated along, like the unfolding of
a banner, so sensible is this flower to the influence of
the sun's rays.
As we were floating through the last of these familiar
meadows, we observed the large and conspicuous flowers
of the hibiscus, covering the dwarf willows, and mingled
with the leaves of the grape, and wished that we could
inform one of our friends behind of the locality of this
somewhat rare and inaccessible flower before it was too
late to pluck it; but we were just gliding out of sight
of the village spire before it occurred to us that the
farmer in the adjacent meadow would go to church on the
morrow, and would carry this news for us; and so by the
Monday, while we should be floating on the Merrimack,
our friend would be reaching to pluck this blossom on the
bank of the Concord.
After a pause at Ball's Hill, the St. Ann's of Concord
voyageurs, not to say any prayer for the success of our
voyage, but to gather the few berries which were still left
on the hills, hanging by very slender threads, we weighed
anchor again, and were soon out of sight of our native
village. The land seemed to grow fairer as we withdrew
from it. Far away to the south-west lay the quiet village,
left alone under its elms and button-woods in mid after-
noon; and the hills, notwithstanding their blue, ethereal
faces, seemed to cast a saddened eye on their old play-
fellows: but, turning short to the north, we bade adieu
to their familiar outlines, and addressed ourselves to new
scenes and adventures. Nought was familiar but the
heavens, from under whose roof the voyageur never pass-
es; but with their countenance, and the acquaintance we
had with river and wood, we trusted to fare well under
any circumstances.
From this point, the river runs perfectly straight for a
mile or more to Carlisle Bridge, which consists of twenty
wooden piers, and when we looked back over it, its sur-
face was reduced to a line's breadth, and appeared like a
cobweb gleaming in the sun. Here and there might be
seen a pole sticking up, to mark the place where some
fisherman had enjoyed unusual luck, and in return had
consecrated his rod to the deities who preside over these
shallows. It was full twice as broad as before, deep and
tranquil, with a muddy bottom, and bordered with wil-
lows, beyond which spread broad lagoons covered with
pads bulrushes and flags.
Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing
with a long birch pole, its silvery bark left on, and
a dog at his side, rowing so near as to agitate his cork
with our oars, and drive away luck for a season; and when
we had rowed a mile as straight as an arrow, with our
faces turned towards him, and the bubbles in our wake still
visible on the tranquil surface, there stood the fisher still
with his dog, like statues under the other side of the
heavens, the only objects to relieve the eye in the extended
meadow; and there would he stand abiding his luck, till
he took his way home through the fields at evening with
his fish. Thus, by one bait or another, Nature allures in-
habitants into all her recesses. This man was the last of
our townsmen whom we saw, and we silently through him
bade adieu to our friends.
The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and
races of men are always existing in epitome in every
neighborhood. The pleasures of my earliest youth have
become the inheritance of other men. This man is still
a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have
lived. Perchance he is not confounded by many know-
ledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how
to take many fishes before the sun sets, with his slender
birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for
him. It is good even to be a fisherman in summer and in
winter. Some men are judges these August days, sitting on
benches, even till the court rises; they sit judging there
honorably, between the seasons and between meals, leading
a civil politic life, arbitrating in the case of Spaulding
versus Cummings, it may be, from highest noon till the
red vesper sinks into the west. The fisherman, mean-
while, stands in three feet of water, under the same sum-
mer's sun, arbitrating in other cases between muckworm
and shiner, amid the fragrance of water-lilies mint and
pontederia, leading his life many rods from the dry land,
within a pole's length of where the larger fishes swim
Human life is to him very much like a river,
— "renning aie downward to the sea."
This was his observation. His honor made a great discovery in
bailments.
I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was
the Walton of this stream, who had come over from New-
castle, England, with his son, the latter a stout and
hearty man who had lifted an anchor in his day. A
straight old man he was who took his way in silence
through the meadows, having passed the period of com-
munication with his fellows; his old experienced coat
hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine
bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you
stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at
length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the
pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in
some old country method, — for youth and age then went
a fishing together, — full of incommunicable thoughts,
perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He
was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the
river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny
hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish, almost
grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat
or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen
through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval
fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I
thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and
I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with
aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-
roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody
else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he
soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His
fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence,
but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the
world, just as the aged read their bibles.
Whether we live by the sea-side, or by the lakes and
rivers, or on the prairie, it concerns us to attend to the
nature of fishes, since they are not phenomena confined to
certain localities only, but forms and phases of the life
in nature universally dispersed. The countless shoals which
annually coast the shores of Europe and America, are not
so interesting to the student of nature, as the more fer-
tile law itself, which deposits their spawn on the tops of
mountains, and on the interior plains; the fish principle
in nature, from which it results that they may be found
in water in so many places, in greater or less numbers.
The natural historian is not a fisherman, who prays- for
cloudy days and good luck merely, but as fishing has been
styled, " a contemplative man's recreation," introducing
him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the
naturalist's observations is not in new genera or species,
but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more
contemplative man's recreation. The seeds of the life of
fishes are every where disseminated, whether the winds
waft them, or the waters float them, or the deep earth
holds them; wherever a pond is dug, straightway it is
stocked with this vivacious race. They have a lease of
nature, and it is not yet out. The Chinese are bribed to
carry their ova from province to province in jars or in
hollow reeds, or the water-birds to transport them to the
mountain tarns and interior lakes. There are fishes wherever
there is a fluid medium, and even in clouds and in melt-
ed metals we detect their semblance. Think how in winter
you can sink a line down straight in a pasture through
snow and through ice, and pull up a bright, slippery,
dumb, subterranean silver or golden fish! It is curi-
ous, also, to reflect how they make one family, from
the largest to the smallest. The least minnow, that lies
on the ice as bait for pickerel, looks like a huge sea-fish
cast up on the shore. In the waters of this town there
are about a dozen distinct species, though the inexpe-
rienced would expect many more.
It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity
of nature, to observe the still undisturbed economy and
content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a
regular fruit of the summer. The fresh-water Sun Fish,
Bream, or Ruff, Pomotis vulgaris, as it were, without
ancestry, without posterity, still represents the Fresh
Water Sun Fish in nature. It is the most common of all, and
seen on every urchin's string; a simple and inoffensive
fish, whose nests are visible all along the shore, hollowed
in the sand, over which it is steadily poised through the
summer hours on waving fin. Sometimes there are twenty
or thirty nests in the space of a few rods, two feet wide
by half a foot in depth, and made with no little labor,
the weeds being removed, and the sand shoved up on the
sides, like a bowl. Here it may be seen early in summer
assiduously brooding, and driving away minnows and
larger fishes, even its own species, which would disturb
its ova, pursuing them a few feet, and circling round
swiftly to its nest again: the minnows, like young sharks,
instantly entering the empty nests, meanwhile, and swal-
lowing the spawn, which is attached to the weeds and to
the bottom, on the sunny side. The spawn is exposed to
so many dangers, that a very small proportion can ever
become fishes, for beside being the constant prey of birds
and fishes, a great many nests are made so near the shore,
in shallow water, that they are left dry in a few days,
as the river goes down. These and the lamprey's are the
only fishes' nests that I have observed, though the ova
of some species may be seen floating on the surface. The
breams are so careful of their charge that you may stand
close by in the water and examine them at your leisure.
I have thus stood over them half an hour at a time, and
stroked them familiarly without frightening them, suffer-
ing them to nibble my fingers harmlessly, and seen them
erect their dorsal fins in anger when my hand approached
their ova, and have even taken them gently out of the
water with my hand; though this cannot be accomplished
by a sudden movement, however dexterous, for instant
warning is conveyed to them through their denser ele-
ment, but only by letting the fingers gradually close a-
bout them as they are poised over the palm, and with the
utmost gentleness raising them slowly to the surface.
Though stationary, they keep up a constant sculling or
waving motion with their fins, which is exceedingly
graceful, and expressive of their humble happiness; for
unlike ours, the element in which they live is a stream
which must be constantly resisted. From time to time
they nibble the weeds at the bottom or overhanging their
nests, or dart after a fly or a worm. The dorsal fin, be-
sides answering the purpose of a keel, with the anal,
serves to keep the fish upright, for in shallow water,
where this is not covered, they fall on their sides. As
you stand thus stooping over the bream in its nest, the
edges of the dorsal and caudal fins have a singular dusty
golden reflection, and its eyes, which stand out from the
head, are transparent and colorless. Seen in its native
element, it is a very beautiful and compact fish, perfect
in all its parts, and looks like a brilliant coin fresh
from the mint. It is a perfect jewel of the river, the
green, red, coppery, and golden reflections of its mottl-
ed sides being the concentration of such rays as struggle
through the floating pads and flowers to the sandy bottom,
and in harmony with the sunlit brown and yellow pebbles.
Behind its watery shield it dwells far from many accidents
inevitable to human life.
There is also another species of bream found in our river,
without the red spot on the operculum, which, according
to M. Agassiz, is undescribed.
The Common Perch, Perca Jlavescens, which name des-
cribes well the gleaming, golden reflections of its
scales as it is drawn out of the water, its red gills stand-
ing out in vain in the thin element, is one of the hand-
somest and most regularly formed of our fishes, and at
such a moment as this reminds us of the fish in the pic-
ture, which wished to be restored to its native element
until it had grown larger; and indeed most of this species
that are caught are not half grown. In the ponds there
is a light-colored and slender kind, which swim in shoals
of many hundreds in the sunny water, in company with
the shiner, averaging not more than six or seven inches
in length, while only a few larger specimens are found in
the deepest water, which prey upon their weaker brethren.
I have often attracted these small perch to the shore at
evening, by rippling the water with my fingers, and they may
sometimes be caught while attempting to pass inside your
hands. It is a tough and heedless fish, biting from impulse,
without nibbling, and from impulse refraining to bite, and
sculling indifferently past. It rather prefers the clear
water and sandy bottoms, though here it has not much
choice. It is a true fish, such as the angler loves to put
into his basket or hang at the top of his willow twig, in
shady afternoons along the banks of the stream. So
many unquestionable fishes he counts, and so many
shiners, which he counts and then throws away.
The Chivin, Dace, Roach, Cousin Trout, or whatever else
it is called, Leuciscus pulchellus, white and red, al-
ways an unexpected prize, which, however, any angler is
glad to hook for its rarity. A name that reminds us of
many an unsuccessful ramble by swift streams, when the
wind rose to disappoint the fisher. It is commonly a sil-
very soft-scaled fish, of graceful, scholarlike and classical
look, like many a picture in an English book. It loves a
swift current and a sandy bottom, and bites inadvertently,
yet not without appetite for the bait. The minnows are
used as bait for pickerel in the winter. The red chivin,
according to some, is still the same fish, only older, or
with its tints deepened as they think by the darker water
it inhabits, as the red clouds swim in the twilight at-
mosphere. He who has not hooked the red chivin is not yet
a complete angler. Other fishes, methinks, are slightly
amphibious, but this is a denizen of the water wholly.
The cork goes dancing down the swift rushing stream, amid
the weeds and sands, when suddenly, by a coincidence
never to be remembered, emerges this fabulous inhabitant
of another element, a thing heard of but not seen, as if
it were the instant creation of an eddy, a true product
of the running stream. And this bright cupreous dol-
phin was spawned and has passed its life beneath the level
of your feet in your native fields. Fishes too, as well as
birds and clouds, derive their armor from the mine. I
have heard of mackerel visiting the copper banks at a
particular season; this fish, perchance, has its habitat
in the Coppermine river. I have caught white chivin of
great size in the Aboljacknagesic, where it empties into
the Penobscot, at the base of Mount Ktaadn, but no
red ones there. The latter variety seems not to have been
sufficiently observed. x
The Dace, Leuciscus argcnteus, is a slight silvery min-
now, found generally in the middle of the stream, where
the current is most rapid, and frequently confounded with
the last named.
The Shiner, Leuciscus crysolcucas, is a soft-scaled and
tender fish, the victim of its stronger neighbors, found
in all places, deep and shallow, clear and turbid; generally
the first nibbler at the bait, but with its small mouth and
nibbling propensities not easily caught. It is a gold or
silver bit that passes current in the river, its limber tail
dimpling the surface in sport or flight. I have seen the
fry, when frightened by something thrown into the water,
leap out by dozens, together with the dace, and wreck
themselves upon a floating plank. It is the little light-
infant of the river, with body armor of gold or silver
spangles, slipping, gliding its life through with a quirk of
the tail, half in the water, half in the air, upward and ever
upward with flitting fin to more crystalline tides, yet still
abreast of us dwellers on the bank. It is almost dissolved
by the summer heats. A slighter and lighter colored
shiner is found in one of our ponds.
The Pickerel, Esox rcticulatus, the swiftest, wariest,
and most ravenous of fishes, is very common in the
shallow and weedy lagoons along the sides of the stream.
It is a solemn, stately, ruminant fish, lurking under the
shadow of a pad at noon, with still, circumspect, voracious
eye, motionless as a jewel set in water, or moving
slowly along to take up its position, darting from time
to time at such unlucky fish or frog or insect as comes
within its range, and swallowing it at a gulp. I have
caught one which had swallowed a brother pickerel
half as large as itself, with the tail still visible in
its mouth, while the head was already digested in its sto-
mach. Sometimes a striped snake, bound to greener meadows
across the stream, ends its undulatory progress in the
same receptacle. They are so greedy and impetuous that
they are frequently caught by being entangled in the line
the moment it is cast. Fishermen also distinguish the
brook pickerel, a shorter and thicker fish than the former.
The Horned Pout, Pimelodus nebulosus, sometimes called
Minister, from the peculiar squeaking noise it makes
when drawn out of the water, is a dull and blundering
fellow, and like the eel vespertinal in his habits, and
fond of the mud. It bites deliberately as if about its
business. They are taken at night with a mass of worms
strung on a thread, which catches in their teeth, some-
times three or four, with an eel, at one pull. They are
extremely tenacious of life, opening and shutting their
mouths for half an hour after their heads have been cut
off". A bloodthirsty and bullying race of rangers, inhab-
iting the fertile river bottoms, with ever a lance in rest,
and ready to do battle with their nearest neighbor. I
have observed them in summer, when every other one had
a long and bloody scar upon his back, where the skin
was gone, the mark, perhaps, of some fierce encounter.
Sometimes the fry, not an inch long, are seen darkening
the shore with their myriads.
The Suckers, Catostomi Bostonienscs and tuber culati,
Common and Horned, perhaps on an average the largest
of our fishes, may be seen in shoals of a hundred or more,
stemming the current in the sun, on their mysterious
migrations, and sometimes sucking in the bait which the
fisherman suffers to float toward them. The former,
which sometimes grow to a large size, are frequently
caught by the hand in the brooks, or like the red chivin,
are jerked out by a hook fastened firmly to the end of a
stick, and placed under their jaws. They are hardly
known to the mere angler, however, not often biting at his
baits, though the spearer carries home many a mess in the
spring. To our village eyes, these shoals have a foreign
and imposing aspect, realizing the fertility of the seas.
The Common Eel, too, Murozna Bostoniensis, the only
species known in the State, a slimy, squirming creature,
informed of mud, still squirming in the pan, is speared
and hooked up with various success. Methinks it too
occurs in picture, left after the deluge, in many a mea-
dow high and dry.
In the shallow parts of the river, where the current is
rapid, and the bottom pebbly, you may sometimes see the
curious circular nests of the Lamprey Eel, Petromyzon
Americanus, the American Stone-Sucker, as large as a cart
wheel, a foot or two in height, and sometimes rising half
a foot above the surface of the water. They collect these
stones, of the size of a hen's egg, with their mouths, as
their name implies, and are said to fashion them into cir-
cles with their tails. They ascend falls by clinging to the
stones, which may sometimes be raised, by lifting the fish
by the tail. As they are not seen on their way down the
streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return,
but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of
trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the sce-
nery of the river bottoms, worthy to be remembered with
Shakspeare's description of the sea-floor. They are rarely
seen in our waters at present, on account of the dams,
though they are taken in great quantities at the mouth of
the river in Lowell. Their nests, which are very con-
spicuous, look more like art than any thing in the river.
If we had leisure this afternoon, we might turn our
prow up the brooks in quest of the classical trout and the
minnows. Of the last alone, according to M. Agassiz,
several of the species found in this town, are yet unde-
scribed. These would, perhaps, complete the list of our
finny contemporaries in the Concord waters.
Salmon, Shad, and Alewives, were formerly abundant
here, and taken in weirs by the Indians, who taught this
method to the whites, by whom they were used as food
and as manure, until the dam, and afterward the canal at
Billerica, and the factories at Lowell, put an end to their
migrations hitherward; though it is thought that a few
more enterprising shad may still occasionally be seen in
this part of the river. It is said, to account for the de-
struction of the fishery, that those who at that time repre-
sented the interests of the fishermen and the fishes, re-
membering between what dates they were accustomed to
take the grown shad, stipulated, that the dams should be
left open for that season only, and the fry, which go down
a month later, were consequently stopped and destroyed by
myriads. Others say that the fish-ways were not properly
constructed. Perchance, after a few thousands of years,
if the fishes will be patient, and pass their summers else-
where, meanwhile, nature will have levelled the Billerica
dam, and the Lowell factories, and the Grass-ground River
run clear again, to be explored by new migratory shoals,
even as far as the Hopkinton pond and Westborough
swamp.
One would like to know more of that race, now extinct,
whose seines lie rotting in the garrets of their children,
who openly professed the trade of fishermen, and even fed
their townsmen creditaby, not skulking through the mea-
dows to a rainy afternoon sport. Dim visions we still get
of miraculous draughts of fishes, and heaps uncountable
by the river-side, from the tales of our seniors sent on
horse-back in their childhood from the neighboring towns,
perched on saddle-bags, with instructions to get the one
bag filled with shad, the other with alewives. At least
one memento of those days may still exist in the memory
of this generation, in the familiar appellation of a cele-
brated train-band of this town, whose untrained ancestors
stood creditably at Concord North Bridge. Their cap-
tain, a man of piscatory tastes, having duly warned his
company to turn out on a certain day, they, like obedient
soldiers, appeared promptly on parade at the appointed
time, but, unfortunately, they went undrilled, except in the
manoeuvres of a soldier's wit and unlicensed jesting, that
May day; for their captain, forgetting his own appoint-
ment, and warned only by the favorable aspect of the
heavens, as he had often done before, went a fishing that
afternoon, and his company thenceforth was known to old
and young, grave and gay, as "The Shad," and by the
youths of this vicinity, this was long regarded as the
proper name of all the irregular militia in Christendom.
But, alas, no record of these fishers' lives remains, that
we know of, unless it be one brief page of hard but un-
questionable history, which occurs in Day Book No. 4.
of an old trader of this town, long since dead, which shows
pretty plainly what constituted a fisherman's stock in
trade in those days. It purports to be a Fisherman's Ac-
count Current, probably for the fishing season of the year
1805, during which months he purchased daily rum and
sugar, sugar and rum, N. E. and W. I., "one cod line,"
"one brown mug," and "a line for the seine;" rum and
sugar, sugar and rum, "good loaf sugar," and "good
brown," W. I. and N. E., in short and uniform entries to
the bottom of the page, all carried out in pounds shillings
and pence, from March 25th to June 5th, and promptly
settled by receiving " cash in full " at the last date. But
perhaps not so settled altogether. These were the neces-
saries of life in those days; with salmon, shad, and ale-
wives, fresh and pickled, he was thereafter independent
on the groceries. Rather a preponderance of the fluid
elements; but such was this fisherman's nature. I can
faintly remember to have seen the same fisher in my ear-
liest youth, still as near the river as he could get, with un-
certain undulatory step, after so many things had gone
down stream, swinging a scythe in the meadow, his bot-
tle like a serpent hid in the grass; himself as yet not cut
down by the Great Mower.
Surely the fates are forever kind, though Nature's laws
are more immutable than any despot's, yet to man's daily
life they rarely seem rigid, but permit him to relax with
license in summer weather. He is not harshly reminded
of the things he may not do. She is very kind and liberal
to all men of vicious habits, and certainly does not deny
them quarter; they do not die without priest. Still they
maintain life along the way, keeping this side the Styx,
still hearty, still resolute, "never better in their lives;"
and again, after a dozen years have elapsed, they start up
from behind a hedge, asking for work and wages for able-
bodied men. Who has not met such
"a beggar on the way,
Who sturdily could gang? "...
"Who cared neither for wind nor wet,
In lands where'er he past?"
"That bold adopts each house he views, his own;
Makes every pulse his checquer, and, at pleasure,
Walks forth, and taxes all the world, like Caesar;" —
As if consistency were the secret of health, while the
poor inconsistent aspirant man, seeking to live a pure
life, feeding on air, divided against himself, cannot stand,
but pines and dies after a life of sickness, on beds of
down.
The unwise are accustomed to speak as if some were
not sick; but methinks the difference between men in
respect to health is not great enough to lay much stress
upon. Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often
happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.
Shad are still taken in the basin of Concord River at
Lowell, where they are said to be a month earlier than
the Merrimack shad, on account of the warmth of the
water. Still patiently, almost pathetically, with instinct
not to be discouraged, not to be reasoned with, revisiting
their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and
still met by the Corporation with its dam. Poor shad!
where is thy redress? When Nature gave thee instinct,
gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate? Still wandering
the sea in thy scaly armor to inquire humbly at the
mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for
thee to enter. By countless shoals loitering uncertain
meanwhile, merely stemming the tide there, in danger from
sea foes in spite of thy bright armor, awaiting new in-
structions, until the sands, until the water itself, tell thee
if it be so or not. Thus by whole migrating nations, full
of instinct, which is thy faith, in this backward spring,
turned adrift, and perchance knowest not where men do
not dwell, where there are not factories, in these days.
Armed with no sword, no electric shock, but mere Shad,
armed only with innocence and a just cause, with tender
dumb mouth only forward, and scales easy to be de-
tached. I for one am with thee, and who knows what
may avail a crow-bar against that Billerica dam? — Not
despairing when whole myriads have gone to feed those sea
monsters during thy suspense, but still brave, indifferent,
on easy fin there, like shad reserved for higher destinies.
Willing to be decimated for man's behoof after the spawn-
ing season. Away with the superficial and selfish philan-
thropy of men, — who knows what admirable virtue of
fishes may be below low-water mark, bearing up against a
hard destiny, not admired by that fellow creature who
alone can appreciate it! Who hears the fishes when they
cry? It will not be forgotten by some memory that we
were contemporaries. Thou shalt ere long have thy way
up the rivers, up all the rivers of the globe, if I am not
mistaken. Yea, even thy dull watery dream shall be
more than realized. If it were not so, but thou wert to
be overlooked at first and at last, then would not I take
their heaven. Yes, I say so, who think I know better
than thou canst. Keep a stiff fin then, and stem all the
tides thou mayest meet.
At length it would seem that the interests, not of the
fishes only, but of the men of Wayland, of Sudbury, of
Concord, demand the levelling of that dam. Innumerable
acres of meadow are waiting to be made dry land, wild
native grass to give place to English. The farmers stand
with scythes whet, waiting the subsiding of the waters,
by gravitation, by evaporation or otherwise, but some-
times their eyes do not rest, their wheels do not roll, on
the quaking meadow ground during the haying season at
all. So many sources of wealth inaccessible. They rate
the loss hereby incurred in the single town of Wayland
alone as equal to the expense of keeping a hundred yoke
of oxen the year round. One year, as I learn, not long
ago, the farmers standing ready to drive their teams
afield as usual, the water gave no signs of falling; with-
out new attraction in the heavens, without freshet or vis-
ible cause, still standing stagnant at an unprecedented
height. All hydrometers were at fault; some trembled
for their English even. But speedy emissaries revealed
the unnatural secret, in the new float-board, wholly a foot
in width, added to their already too high privileges by the
dam proprietors. The hundred yoke of oxen, meanwhile,
standing patient, gazing wishfully meadowward, at that
inaccessible waving native grass, uncut but by the great
mower Time, who cuts so broad a swathe, without so
much as a wisp to wind about their horns.
That was a long pull from Ball's Hill to Carlisle Brjdge,
sitting with our faces to the south, a slight breeze rising
from the north, but nevertheless water still runs and
grass grows, for now, having passed the bridge between
Carlisle and Bedford, we see men haying far off in the
meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they
cut. In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike.
As the night stole over, such a freshness was wafted across
the meadow that every blade of cut-grass seemed to teem
with life. Faint purple clouds began to be reflected in the
water, and the cow-bells tinkled louder along the banks,
while, like sly water rats, we stole along nearer the shore,
looking for a place to pitch our camp.
At length, when we had made about seven miles, as far
as Billerica, we moored our boat on the west side of a
little rising ground which in the spring forms an island in
the river. Here we found huckleberries still hanging upon
the bushes, where they seemed to have slowly ripened
for our especial use. Bread and sugar, and cocoa boiled
in river water made our repast, and as we had drank in
the fluvial prospect all day, so now we took a draught of
the water with our evening meal to propitiate the river
gods, and whet our vision for the sights it was to behold.
The sun was setting on the one hand, while our eminence
was contributing its shadow to the night, on the other. It
seemed insensibly to grow lighter as the night shut in,
and a distant and solitary farm-house was revealed, which
before lurked in the shadows of the noon. There was no
other house in sight, nor any cultivated field. To the
right and left, as far as the horizon, were straggling pine
woods with their plumes against the sky, and across the
river were rugged hills, covered with shrub oaks, tangled
with grape vines and ivy, with here and there a gray rock
jutting out from the maze. The sides of these cliffs,
though a quarter of a mile distant, were almost heard to
rustle while we looked at them, it was such a leafy wilder-
ness; a place for fauns and satyrs, and where bats hung
all day to the rocks, and at evening flitted over the water,
and fireflies husbanded their light under the grass and
leaves against the night. When he had pitched our tents
on the hill-side, a few rods from the shore, we sat looking
through its triangular door in the twilight at our lonely
mast on the shore, just seen above the alders, and hardly
yet come to a stand-still from the swaying of the stream;
the first encroachment of commerce on this land. There
was our port, our Ostia. That straight geometrical line
against the water and the sky stood for the last refinements
of civilized life, and what of sublimity there is in history
was there symbolized.
For the most part, there was no recognition of human
life in the night, no human breathing was heard, only the
breathing of the wind. As we sat up, kept awake by the
novelty of our situation, we heard at intervals foxes step-
ping about over the dead leaves, and brushing the dewy
grass close to our tent, and once a musquash fumbling
among the potatoes and melons in our boat, but when we
hastened to the shore we could detect only a ripple in the
water ruffling the disk of a star. At intervals we were
serenaded by the song of a dreaming sparrow or the throt-
tled cry of an owl, but after each sound which near at
hand broke the stillness of the night, each crackling of
the twigs, or rustling among the leaves, there was a sud-
den pause, and deeper and more conscious silence, as if
the intruder were aware that no life was rightfully abroad
at that hour. There was a fire in Lowell, as we judged,
this night, and we saw the horizon blazing, and heard the
distant alarm bells, as it were a faint tinkling music borne
to these woods. But the most constant and memorable
sound of a summer's night, which we did not fail to hear
every night afterward, though at no time so incessantly
and so favorably as now, was the barking of the house
dogs, from the loudest and hoarsest bark to the faintest
aerial palpitation under the eaves of heaven, from the pa-
tient but anxious mastiff to the timid and wakeful terrier,
at first loud and rapid, then faint and slow, to be imitated
only in a whisper; wow-wow-wow-wow — wo woww. Even
in a retired and uninhabited district like this, it was a suf-
ficiency of sound for the ear of night, and more impressive
than any music. I have heard the voice of a hound, just
before daylight, while the stars were shining, from over
the woods and river, far in the horizon, when it sounded
as sweet and melodious as an instrument. The hounding
of a dog pursuing a fox or other animal in the horizon,
may have first suggested the notes of the hunting horn
to alternate with and relieve the lungs of the dog. This
natural bugle long resounded in the woods of the an-
cient world before the horn was invented. The very
dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farm-yards in
these nights, excite more heroism in our breasts than
all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age. "I
had rather be a dog, and bay the moon," than many a
Roman that I know. The night is equally indebted to
the clarion of the cock, with wakeful hope, from the very
setting of the sun, prematurely ushering in the dawn.
All these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of
dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of
nature's health or sound state. Such is the never failing
beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in
the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it.
At length the antepenultimate and drowsy hours drew
on, and all sounds were denied entrance to our ears.
Who sleeps by day and walks by night,
Will meet no spirit but some sprite.
SUNDAY.
"The river calmly flows,
Through shining banks, through lonely glen,
Where the owl shrieks, though ne'er the cheer of men
Has stirred its mute repose,
Still if you should walk there, you would go there again."
--Channing
" The Indians tell us of a beautiful River lying far to
the south, which they call Merrimac."
Sieur de Monts, Relations of the Jesuits, 1604.
SUNDAY.
In the morning the river and adjacent country were
covered with a dense fog, through which the smoke of our
fire curled up like a still subtiler mist; but before we had
rowed many rods, the sun arose and the fog rapidly dis-
persed, leaving a slight steam only to curl along the sur-
face of the water. It was a quiet Sunday morning, with
more of the auroral rosy and white than of the yellow
light in it, as if it dated from earlier than the fall of man,
and still preserved a heathenish integrity; —
An early unconverted Saint,
Free from noontide or evening taint,
Heathen without reproach,
That did upon the civil day encroach,
And ever since its birth
Had trod the outskirts of the earth.
But the impressions which the morning makes vanish
with its dews, and not even the most "persevering mortal "
can preserve the memory of its freshness to mid-day. As
we passed the various islands, or what were islands in the
spring, rowing with our backs down stream, we gave
names to them. The one on which we had camped we
called Fox Island, and one fine densely wooded island
surrounded by deep water and overrun by grape vines,
which looked like a mass of verdure and of flowers cast
upon the waves, we named Grape Island.From Ball's
Hill to Billerica meeting-house, the river was still twice as
broad as in Concord, a deep, dark, and dead stream, flow-
ing between gentle hills and sometimes cliffs, and well
wooded all the way. It was a long woodland lake bor-
dered with willows. For long reaches we could see
neither house nor cultivated field, nor any sign of the
vicinity of man. Now we coasted along some shallow
shore by the edge of a dense palisade of bulrushes, which
straightly bounded the water as if dipt by art, reminding
us of the reed forts of the East Indians, of which we had
read; and now the bank slightly raised was overhung with
graceful grasses and various species of brake, whose
downy stems stood closely grouped and naked as in a
vase, while their heads spread several feet on either side.
The dead limbs of the willow were rounded and adorned
by the climbing mikania, mikania scandens, which filled
every crevice in the leafy bank, contrasting agreeably
with the gray bark of its supporter and the balls of the
button-bush. The water willow, salix Purshiana, when
it is of large size and entire, is the most graceful and
ethereal of our trees. Its masses of light green foliage,
piled one upon another to the height of twenty or thirty
feet, seemed to float on the surface of the water, while
the slight gray stems and the shore were hardly visible
between them. No tree is so wedded to the water, and
harmonizes so well with still streams. It is even more
graceful than the weeping willow, or any pendulous trees,
which dip their branches in the stream instead of being
buoyed up by it. Its limbs curved outward over the sur-
face as if attracted by it. It had not a New England
but an oriental character, reminding us of trim Persian
gardens, of Haroun Alraschid, and the artificial lakes of
the east.
As we thus dipped our way along between fresh masses
of foliage overrun with the grape and smaller flowering
vines, the surface was so calm, and both air and water so
transparent, that the flight of a kingfisher or robin over
the river was as distinctly seen reflected in the water be-
low as in the air above. The birds seemed to flit through
submerged groves, alighting on the yielding sprays, and
their clear notes to come up from below. We were un-
certain whether the water floated the land, or the land
held the water in its bosom. It was such a season, in
short, as that in which one of our Concord poets sailed
on its stream, and sung its quiet glories.
"There is an inward voice, that in the stream
Sends forth its spirit to the listening ear,
And in a calm content it floweth on,
Like wisdom, welcome with its own respect.
Clear in its breast lie all these beauteous thoughts,
It doth receive the green and graceful trees,
And the gray rocks smile in its peaceful arms, — "
And more he sung, but too serious for our page. For
every oak and birch too growing on the hill-top, as well
as for these elms and willows, we knew that there was a
graceful ethereal and ideal tree making down from the
roots, and sometimes nature in high tides brings her mir-
ror to its foot and makes it visible. The stillness was
intense and almost conscious, as if it were a natural
Sabbath. The air was so elastic and crystalline that
it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass
has on a picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and
perfection. The landscape was clothed in a mild and
quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered
and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and
uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness
to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and pic-
turesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairy-land.
The world seemed decked for some holyday or prouder
pageantry, with silken streamers flying, and the course
of our lives to wind on before us like a green lane
into a country maze, at the season when fruit trees are
in blossom.
Why should not our whole life and its scenery be ac-
tually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suit-
able background. They should at least, like the life of
the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in the
desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limit-
less horizon. Character always secures for itself this ad-
vantage, and is thus distinct and unrelated to near or
trivial objects, whether things or persons. On this same
stream a maiden once sailed in my boat, thus unattended
but by invisible guardians, and as she sat in the prow
there was nothing but herself between the steersman and
the sky. I could then say with the poet; —
"Sweet falls the summer air
Over her frame who sails with me;
Her way like that is beautifully free,
Her nature far more rare,
And is her constant heart of virgin purity."
At evening still the very stars seem but this maiden's
emissaries and reporters of her progress.
Low in the eastern sky-
Is set thy glancing eye;
And though its gracious light
Ne'er riseth to my sight,
Yet every star that climbs
Above the gnarled limbs
Of yonder hill,
Conveys thy gentle will.
Believe I knew thy thought,
And that the zephyrs brought
Thy kindest wishes through,
As mine they bear to you,
That some attentive cloud
Did pause amid the crowd
Over my head,
While gentle things were said.
Believe the thrushes sung,
And that the flower bells rung,
That herbs exhaled their scent,
And beasts knew what was meant,
The trees a welcome waved,
And lakes their margins laved,
When thy free mind
To my retreat did wind.
It was a summer eve,
The air did gently heave,
While yet a low hung cloud
Thy eastern skies did shroud;
The lightning's silent gleam,
Startling my drowsy dream,
Seemed like the flash
Under thy dark eyelash.
Still will I strive to be
As if thou wert with me;
Whatever path I take,
It shall be for thy sake,
Of gentle slope and wide,
As thou wert by my side,
Without a root
To trip thy gentle foot.
I'll walk with gentle pace,
And choose the smoothest place,
And careful dip the oar,
And shun the winding shore,
And gently steer my boat
Where water lilies float,
And cardinal flowers
Stand in their sylvan bowers.
It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the
mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and
blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully
indeed for art to imitate, for only nature may exaggerate
herself. The shallowest still water is unfathomable. Wher-
ever the trees and skies are reflected there is more than
Atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground.
We noticed that it required a separate intention of the
eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected
trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely;
and so are there manifold visions in the direction of every
object, and even the most opaque reflect the heavens
from their surface. Some men have their eyes naturally
intended to the one, and some to the other object.
"A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And the heavens espy."
Two men in a skiff, whom we passed hereabouts, float-
ing buoyantly amid the reflections of the trees, like a
feather in mid air, or a leaf which is wafted gently from
its twig to the water without turning over, seemed still in
their element, and to have very delicately availed them-
selves of the natural laws. Their floating there was a
beautiful and successful experiment in natural philosophy,
and it served to ennoble in our eyes the art of navigation,
for as birds fly and fishes swim, so these men sailed. It
reminded us how much fairer and nobler all the actions
of man might be, and that our life in its whole economy
might be as beautiful as the fairest works of art or
nature.
The sun lodged on the old gray cliffs, and glanced from
every pad; the bulrushes and flags seemed to rejoice in
the delicious light and air; the meadows were a drinking
at their leisure; the frogs sat meditating, all Sabbath
thoughts, summing up their week, with one eye out on
the golden sun, and one toe upon a reed, eyeing the won-
drous universe in which they act their part; the fishes
swam more staid and soberly, as maidens go to church;
shoals of golden and silver minnows rose to the surface to
behold the heavens, and then sheered off into more sombre
aisles; they swept by as if moved by one mind, continually
gliding past each other, and yet preserving the form of
their battalion unchanged, as if they were still embraced
by the transparent membrane which held the spawn; a
young band of brethren and sisters, trying their new fins;
now they wheeled, now shot ahead, and when we drove
them to the shore and cut them off, they dexterously tacked
and passed underneath the boat. Over the old wooden
bridges no traveller crossed, and neither the river nor the
fishes avoided to glide between the abutments.
Here was a village not far off behind the woods, Bille-
rica, settled not long ago, and the children still bear the
names of the first settlers in this late "howling wilder-
ness;" yet to all intents and purposes it is as old as Fernay
or as Mantua, an old gray town, where men grow old and
sleep already under moss-grown monuments, — outgrow
their usefulness. This is ancient Billerica, (Villarica?) now
in its dotage. I never heard that it was young. See, is
not nature here gone to decay, farms all run out, meeting-
house grown gray and racked with age? If you would
know of its early youth, ask those old gray rocks in the
pasture. It has a bell that sounds sometimes as far as
Concord woods; I have heard that, aye, — hear it now.
No wonder that such a sound startled the dreaming Indian,
and frightened his game, when the first bells were swung
on trees, and sounded through the forest beyond the plan-
tations of the white man. But to-day I like best the echo
amid these cliffs and woods. It is no feeble imitation,
but rather its original, or as if some rural Orpheus played
over the strain again to show how it should sound.
Dong, sounds the brass in the east,
As if to a funeral feast,
But I like that sound the best
Out of the fluttering west.
The steeple ringeth a knell,
But the fairies' silvery bell
Is the voice of that gentle folk,
Or else the horizon that spoke.
Its metal is not of brass,
But air, and water, and glass,
And under a cloud it is swung,
And by the wind it is rung.
When the steeple tolleth the noon,
It soundeth not so soon,
Yet it rings a far earlier hour,
And the sun has not reached its tower.
On the other hand, the road runs up to Carlisle, city of
the woods, which, if it is less civil, is the more natural.
It does well hold the earth together. It gets laughed at
because it is a small town, I know, but nevertheless it is
a place where great men may be born any day, for fair
winds and foul blow right on over it without distinction.
It has a meeting-house and horse-sheds, a tavern and a
blacksmith's shop for centre, and a good deal of wood to
cut and cord yet. And
"Bedford, most noble Bedford,
I shall not thee forget."
History has remembered thee; especially that meek and
humble petition of thy old planters, like the wailing of
the Lord's own people, "To the gentlemen, the select-
men " of Concord, praying to be erected into a separate
parish. We can hardly credit that so plaintive a psalm
resounded but little more than a century ago along these
Babylonish waters. "In the extreme difficult seasons of
heat and cold," said they, "we were ready to say of the
Sabbath, Behold what a weariness is it." — "Gentlemen,
if our seeking to draw off proceed from any disaffection
to our present reverend pastor, or the Christian society
with whom we have taken such sweet counsel together,
and walked unto the house of God in company, then hear
us not this day, but we greatly desire, if God please, to
be eased of our burden on the Sabbath, the travel and fa-
tigue thereof, that the word of God may be nigh to us,
near to our houses, and in our hearts, that we and our
little ones may serve the Lord. We hope that God, who
stirred up the spirit of Cyrus to set forward temple work,
has stirred us up to ask, and will stir you up to grant, the
prayer of our petition; so shall your humble petitioners
ever pray, as in duty bound, — ." And so the temple
work went forward here to a happy conclusion. Yonder
in Carlisle the building of the temple was many wearisome
years delayed, not that there was wanting of Shittim
wood, or the gold of Ophir, but a site therefor convenient
to all the worshippers; whether on " Buttrick's Plain," or
rather on "Poplar Hill : " it was a tedious question.
In this Billerica solid men must have lived, select from
year to year, a series of town clerks, at least, and there
are old records that you may search. Some spring the
white man came, built him a house, and made a clearing
here, letting in the sun, dried up a farm, piled up the old
gray stones in fences, cut down the pines around his
dwelling, planted orchard seeds brought from the old
country, and persuaded the civil apple tree to blossom
next to the wild pine and the juniper, shedding its perfume
in the wilderness. Their old stocks still remain. He
culled the graceful elm from out the woods and from the
river-side, and so refined and smoothed his village plot.
And thus he plants a town. He rudely bridged the stream,
and drove his team afield into the river meadows, cut the
wild grass, and laid bare the homes of beaver, otter, musk-
rat, and with the whetting of his scythe scared off the
deer and bear. He set up a mill, and fields of English
grain sprang in the virgin soil. And with his grain he
scattered the seeds of the dandelion and the wild trefoil
over the meadows, mingling his English flowers with the
wild native ones. The bristling burdock, the sweet
scented catnip, and the humble yarrow, planted them-
selves along his woodland road, they too seeking " free-
dom to worship God " in their way. The white man's
mullein soon reigned in Indian corn-fields, and sweet
scented English grasses clothed the new soil. Where,
then, could the red man set his foot? The honey bee
hummed through the Massachusetts' woods, and sipped the
wild flowers round the Indian's wigwam, perchance un-
noticed, when, with prophetic warning, it stung the red
child's hand, forerunner of that industrious tribe that was
to come and pluck the wild flower of his race up by the
root.
The white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load
of thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked
up, knowing well what he knows, not guessing but cal-
culating; strong in community, yielding obedience to
authority; of experienced race; of wonderful, wonderful
common sense; dull but capable, slow but persevering,
severe but just, of little humor but genuine; a laboring
man, despising game and sport; building a house that en-
dures, a framed house. He buys the Indian's moccasins
and baskets, then buys his hunting grounds, and at length
forgets where he is buried, and plows up his bones.
And here town records, old, tattered, time-worn, weather-
stained chronicles, contain the Indian sachem's mark, per-
chance, an arrow or a beaver, and the {ew fatal words by
which he deeded his hunting grounds away. He comes
with a list of ancient Saxon, Norman, and Celtic names,
and strews them up and down this river, — Framingham,
Sudbury, Bedford, Carlisle, Billerica, Chelmsford, — and
this is New Angle-land, and these are the new West Sax-
ons, whom the red men call, not Angle-ish or English,
but Yengeese, and so at last they are known for Yankees.
When we were opposite to the middle of Billerica, the
fields on either hand had a soft and cultivated English as-
pect, the village spire being seen over the copses which
skirt the river, and sometimes an orchard straggled
down to the water side, though, generally, our course this
forenoon was the wildest part of our voyage. It seemed
that men led a quiet and very civil life there. The in-
habitants were plainly cultivators of the earth, and lived
under an organized political government. The school-
house stood with a meek aspect, entreating a long truce to
war and savage life. Every one finds by his own expe-
rience, as well as in history, that the era in which men
cultivate the apple, and the amenities of the garden, is
essentially different from that of the hunter and forest life,
and neither can displace the other without loss. We
have all had our day dreams, as well as more prophetic
nocturnal visions, but as for farming, I am convinced that
my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural.
I would at least strike my spade into the earth with such
careless freedom but accuracy as the woodpecker his bill
into a tree. There is in my nature, methinks, a singular
yearning toward all wildness. I know of no redeeming
qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and
when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground. What
have I to do with plows? I cut another furrow than you
see. Where the off ox treads, there is it not, it is further
off; where the nigh ox walks, it will not be, it is nigher
still. If corn fails, my crop fails not, and what are
drought and rain to me? The rude Saxon pioneer will
sometimes pine for that refinement and artificial beauty
which are English, and love to hear the sound of such sweet
and classical names as the Pentland and Malvern Hills,
the Cliffs of Dover and the Trosachs, Richmond, Der-
went, and Winandermere, which are to him now instead
of the Acropolis and Parthenon, of Baiae, and Athens
with its sea walls, and Arcadia and Tempe.
Greece, who am I that should remember thee,
Thy Marathon and thy Thermopylae?
Is my life vulgar, my fate mean,
Which on these golden memories can lean1?
We are apt enough to be pleased with such books as
Evelyn's Sylva, Acetarium, and Kalendarium Hortense,
but they imply a relaxed nerve in the reader. Gardening
is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of
the forest and the outlaw. There may be an excess of
cultivation as well as of any thing else, until civilization
becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man, — all whose
bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but
good manners! The young pines springing up in the
corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.
We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name
for his improvement. By the wary independence and
aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse
with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to
a rare and peculiar society with nature. He has glances
of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers.
The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because
distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars
compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-
lived blaze of candles. The Society Islanders had their
day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be " of
equal antiquity with the atua fauau po, or night-born
gods." It is true, there are the innocent pleasures of
country life, and it is sometimes pleasant to make the
earth yield her increase, and gather the fruits in their
season, but the heroic spirit will not fail to dream of re-
moter retirements and more rugged paths. It will have
its garden plots and its parterres elsewhere than on the
earth, and gather nuts and berries by the way for its
subsistence, or orchard fruits with such heedlessness as
berries. We would not always be soothing and taming
nature, breaking the horse and the ox, but sometimes ride
the horse wild and chase the buffalo. The Indian's in-
tercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the
greatest independence of each. If he is somewhat of a
stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much of a fa-
miliar. There is something vulgar and foul in the latter's
closeness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in
the former's distance. In civilization, as in a southern
latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the in-
cursion of more northern tribes,
" Some nation yet shut in
With hills of ice."
There are other, savager, and more primeval aspects
of nature than our poets have sung. It is only white
man's poetry. Homer and Ossian even can never revive
in London or Boston. And yet behold how these cities
are refreshed by the mere tradition, or the imperfectly
transmitted fragrance and flavor of these wild fruits. If
we could listen but for an instant to the chaunt of the
Indian muse, we should understand why he will not ex-
change his savageness for civilization. Nations are not
whimsical. Steel and blankets are strong temptations;
but the Indian does well to continue Indian.
Mythology Interlude
By noon we were let down into the Merrimack through
the locks at Middlesex, just above Pawtucket Falls, by a
serene and liberal-minded man, who came quietly from his
book, though his duties, we supposed, did not require him
to open the locks on Sundays. With him we had a just
and equal encounter of the eyes, as between two honest
men.
The movements of the eyes express the perpetual and
unconscious courtesy of the parties. It is said, that a
rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an hon-
est man look at you as if he had his reputation to estab-
lish. I have seen some who did not know when to turn
aside their eyes in meeting yours. A truly confident and
magnanimous spirit is wiser than to contend for the mas-
tery in such encounters. Serpents alone conquer by the
steadiness of their gaze. My friend looks me in the face
and sees me, that is all.
The best relations were at once established between us
and this man, and though few words were spoken, he
could not conceal a visible interest in us and our excur-
sion. He was a lover of the higher mathematics, as we
found, and in the midst of some vast sunny problem, when
we overtook him and whispered our conjectures. By this
man we were presented with the freedom of the Merri-
mack. We now felt as if we were fairly launched on
the ocean-stream of our voyage, and were pleased to find
that our boat would float on Merrimack water. We be-
gan again busily to put in practice those old arts of
rowing, steering, and paddling. It seemed a strange phe-
nomenon to us that the two rivers should mingle their
waters so readily, since we had never associated them in
our thoughts.
As we glided over the broad bosom of the Merrimack,
between Chelmsford and Dracut, at noon, here a quarter
of a mile wide, the rattling of our oars'was echoed over
the water to those villages, and their slight sounds to
us. Their harbors lay as smooth and fairy-like as the
Lido, or Syracuse, or Rhodes, in our imagination, while,
like some strange roving craft, we flitted past what seemed
the dwellings of5 noble home-staying men, seemingly as
conspicuous as if on an eminence, or floating upon a
tide which came up to those villagers' breasts. At a third
of a mile over the water we heard distinctly some children
repeating their catechism in a cottage near the shore,
while in the broad shallows between, a herd of cows stood
lashing their sides, and waging war with the flies.
Two hundred years ago other catechising than this was
going on here; for here came the Sachem Wannalancet,
and his people, and sometimes Tahatawan, our Concord
Sachem, who afterwards had a church at home, to catch
fish at the falls; and here also came John Elliot, with the
Bible and Catechism, and Baxter's Call to the Uncon-
verted, and other tracts, done into the Massachusetts
tongue, and taught them Christianity meanwhile. "This
place," says Gookin, referring to Wamesit, "being an ancient
and capital seat of Indians, they come to fish; and this
good man takes this opportunity to spread the net of the
gospel, to fish for their souls." — "May 5th, 1674," he con-
tinues, " according to our usual custom, Mr. Eliot and myself
took our journey to Wamesit, or Pawtuckett; and arriving there
that evening, Mr. Eliot preached to as many of them as could
be got together, out of Matt. xxii. 1-14, the parable of the
marriage of the king's son. We met at the wigwam of one call-
ed Wannalancet, about two miles from the town, near Pawtuckett
falls, and bordering upon Merrimak river. This person, Wanna-
lancet, is the eldest son of old Pasaconaway, the chiefest
sachem of Paw- tuckett. He is a sober and grave person, and
of years, between fifty and sixty. He hath been always loving
and friendly to the English." As yet, however, they had not
prevailed on him to embrace the Christian religion. " But at
this time," says Goo- kin, "May 6, 1674," — "after some del-
iberation and serious pause, he stood up, and made a speech
to this effect : — 'I must acknowledge I have, all my days,
used to pass in an old canoe, (alluding to his frequent cus-
tom to pass in a canoe upon the river) and now you exhort me
to change and leave my old canoe, and em- bark in a new canoe,
to which I have hitherto been unwilling; but now I yield up
myself to your advice, and enter into a new canoe, and do
engage to pray to God hereafter.' " One " Mr. Richard Daniel,
a gentleman that lived in Billerica," who with other " per-
sons of quality " was present, " desired brother Eliot to
tell the sachem from him, that it may be, while he went in
his old canoe, he passed in a quiet stream; but the end
thereof was death and destruction to soul and body. But
now he went into a new canoe, perhaps he would meet with
storms and trials, but yet he should be encouraged to per-
severe, for the end of his voyage would be everlasting
rest." — "Since that time, I hear this sachem doth per-
severe, and is a constant and diligent hearer of God's
word, and sanctifieth the Sabbath, though he doth travel
to Wam- esit meeting every Sabbath, which is above two
miles; and though sundry of his people have deserted him,
since he subjected to the gospel, yet he continues and
persists." — GooJcin,s Hist. Coll. of the Indians in New
England, 1674.
Already, as appears from the records, "At a General Court
held at Boston in New England, the 7th of the first month,
1643-4." — "Wassamequin , Nashoonon, Kutchamaquin, Massa-
conomet, and Squaw Sachem, did voluntarily submit them-
selves " to the English; and among other things did "pro-
mise to be wil- ling from time to time to be instructed in
the knowledge of God." Being asked " Not to do any unnec-
essary work on the Sabbath day, especially within the gates
of Christian towns," they answered, "It is easy to them;
they have not much to 'do on any day, and they can well
take their rest on that day." — "So," says Winthrop, in
his Journal, " we causing them to understand the articles,
and all the ten commandments of God, and they freely as-
senting to all, they were solemnly received, and then pre-
sented the Court with twenty-six fathom more of wampom;
and the Court gave each of them a coat of two yards of
cloth, and their dinner; and to them and their men, every
of them, a cup of sack at their departure; so they took
leave and went away."
What journeyings on foot and on horseback through
the wilderness, to preach the gospel to these minks and
muskrats ! who first, no doubt, listened with their red
ears out of a natural hospitality and courtesy, and after-
ward from curiosity or even interest, till at length there
were "praying Indians," and, as the General Court wrote
to Cromwell, the " work is brought to this perfection, that
some of the Indians themselves can pray and prophesy in
a comfortable manner."
It was in fact an old battle and hunting ground through
which we had been floating, the ancient dwelling-place of
a race of hunters and warriors. Their weirs of stone,
their arrowheads and hatchets, their pestles, and the mor-
tars in which they pounded Indian corn before the white
man had tasted it, lay concealed in the mud of the river
bottom. Tradition still points out the spots where they
took fish in the greatest numbers, by such arts as they
possessed. It is a rapid story the historian will have to
put together. Miantonimo, — Winthrop, — Webster. Soon
he comes from Mount Hope, to Bunker Hill, from bear-
skins, parched corn, bows and arrows, to tiled roofs,
wheat fields, guns and swords. Pawtucket and Wamesit,
where the Indians resorted in the fishing season, are now
Lowell, the city of spindles and Manchester of America,
which sends its cotton cloth round the globe. Even we
youthful voyagers had spent a part of our lives in the village
of Chelmsford, when the present city, whose bells we heard,
was its obscure north district only, and the giant weaver
was not yet fairly born. So old are we; so young is it.
We were thus entering the State of New Hampshire on
the bosom of the flood formed by the tribute of its innu-
merable valleys. The river was the only key which could
unlock its maze, presenting its hills and valleys, its lakes
and streams, in" their natural order and position. The
Merrimack, or Sturgeon River, is formed by the con-
fluence of the Pemigewasset, which rises near the Notch
of the White Mountains, and the Winnepisiogee, which
drains the lake of the same name, signifying " The Smile
of the Great Spirit." From their junction it runs south
seventy-eight miles to Massachusetts, and thence east
thirty-five miles to the sea. I have traced its stream from
where it bubbles out of the rocks of the White Moun-
tains above the clouds, to where it is lost amid the salt
billows of the ocean on Plum Island beach. At first it
comes on murmuring to itself by the base of stately and
retired mountains, through moist primitive woods whose
juices it receives, where the bear still drinks it, and the
cabins of settlers are far between, and there are few to
cross its stream; enjoying in solitude its cascades still un-
known to fame; by long ranges of mountains of Sandwich
and of Squam, slumbering like tumuli of Titans, with the
peaks of Moosehillock, the Haystack, and Kearsarge re-
flected in its waters; where the maple and the raspberry,
those lovers of the hills, flourish amid temperate dews; —
flowing long and full of meaning, but untranslatable as
its name Pemigewasset, by many a pastured Pelion and
Ossa, where unnamed muses haunt, tended by Oreads,
Dryads, Naiads, and receiving the tribute of many an un-
tasted Hippocrene. There are earth, air, fire, and water, —
very well, this is water, and down it comes.
Such water do the gods distil,
And pour down every hill
For their New England men;
A draught of this wild nectar bring,
And I'll not taste the spring
Of Helicon again.
Falling all the way, and yet not discouraged by the lowest
fall. By the law of its birth never to become stagnant,
for it has come out of the clouds, and down the sides of
precipices worn in the flood, through beaver dams broke
loose, not splitting but splicing and mending itself, until
it found a breathing place in this low land. There is no
danger now that the sun will steal it back to heaven again
before it reach the sea, for it has a warrant even to re-
cover its own dews into its bosom again with interest at
every eve.
It was already the water of Squam and Newfound Lake
and Winnepisiogee, and White Mountain snow dissolved,
on which we were floating, and Smith's and Baker's and
Mad Rivers, and Nashua and Souhegan and Piscataquoag,
and Suncook and Soucook and Contoocook, mingled in in-
calculable proportions, still fluid, yellowish, restless
all, with an ancient, ineradicable inclination to the sea.
So it flows on down by Lowell and Haverhill, at which
last place it first suffers a sea change, and a few masts
betray the vicinity of the ocean. Between the towns of
Amesbury and Newbury it is a broad commercial river,
from a third to half a mile in width, no longer skirted
with yellow and crumbling banks, but backed by high
green hills and pastures, with frequent white beaches on
which the fishermen draw up their nets. I have passed
down this portion of the river in a steam-boat, and it
was a pleasant sight to watch from its deck the fisher-
men dragging their seines on the distant shore, as in
pictures of a foreign strand. At intervals you may meet
with' a schooner laden with lumber, standing up to Haver-
hill, or else lying at anchor or aground, waiting for wind
or tide; until, at last, you glide under the famous Chain
Bridge, and are landed at Newburyport. Thus she who
at first was " poore of waters, naked of renowne," having
received so many fair tributaries, as was said of the Forth,
"Doth grow the greater still, the further downe;
Till that abounding both in power and fame,
She long doth strive to give the sea her name;":
or if not her name, in this case, at least the impulse of her stream.
From the steeples of Newburyport you may review this river stretching
far up into the country, with many a white sail glancing over it like
an inland sea, and behold, as one wrote who was born on its
head-waters, "Down out at its mouth, the dark inky main blending with
the blue above. Plum Island, its sand ridges scolloping along the
horizon like the sea-serpent, and the distant outline broken by many a
tall ship, leaning, still, against the sky."
Rising at an equal height with the Connecticut, the Merrimack reaches
the sea by a course only half as long, and hence has no leisure to form
broad and fertile meadows, like the former, but is hurried along
rapids, and down numerous falls, without long delay. The banks are
generally steep and high, with a narrow interval reaching back to the
hills, which is only rarely or partially overflown at present, and is
much valued by the farmers. Between Chelmsford and Concord, in New
Hampshire, it varies from twenty to seventy-five rods in width. It is
probably wider than it was formerly, in many places, owing to the trees
having been cut down, and the consequent wasting away of its banks. The
influence of the Pawtucket Dam is felt as far up as Cromwell’s Falls,
and many think that the banks are being abraded and the river filled up
again by this cause. Like all our rivers, it is liable to freshets, and
the Pemigewasset has been known to rise twenty-five feet in a few
hours. It is navigable for vessels of burden about twenty miles; for
canal-boats, by means of locks, as far as Concord in New Hampshire,
about seventy-five miles from its mouth; and for smaller boats to
Plymouth, one hundred and thirteen miles. A small steamboat once plied
between Lowell and Nashua, before the railroad was built, and one now
runs from Newburyport to Haverhill.
Unfitted to some extent for the purposes of commerce by the sand-bar at
its mouth, see how this river was devoted from the first to the service
of manufactures. Issuing from the iron region of Franconia, and flowing
through still uncut forests, by inexhaustible ledges of granite, with
Squam, and Winnipiseogee, and Newfound, and Massabesic Lakes for its
mill-ponds, it falls over a succession of natural dams, where it has
been offering its privileges in vain for ages, until at last the
Yankee race came to improve them. Standing at its mouth, look up its
sparkling stream to its source,—a silver cascade which falls all the
way from the White Mountains to the sea,—and behold a city on each
successive plateau, a busy colony of human beaver around every fall.
Not to mention Newburyport and Haverhill, see Lawrence, and Lowell, and
Nashua, and Manchester, and Concord, gleaming one above the other. When
at length it has escaped from under the last of the factories, it has a
level and unmolested passage to the sea, a mere waste water, as it
were, bearing little with it but its fame; its pleasant course revealed
by the morning fog which hangs over it, and the sails of the few small
vessels which transact the commerce of Haverhill and Newburyport. But
its real vessels are railroad cars, and its true and main stream,
flowing by an iron channel farther south, may be traced by a long line
of vapor amid the hills, which no morning wind ever disperses, to where
it empties into the sea at Boston. This side is the louder murmur now.
Instead of the scream of a fish-hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the
whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.
This river too was at length discovered by the white man, "trending
up
into the land," he knew not how far, possibly an inlet to the South
Sea. Its valley, as far as the Winnipiseogee, was first surveyed in
1652. The first settlers of Massachusetts supposed that the
Connecticut, in one part of its course, ran northwest, "so near the
great lake as the Indians do pass their canoes into it over land." From
which lake and the "hideous swamps" about it, as they supposed,
came
all the beaver that was traded between Virginia and Canada,—and the
Potomac was thought to come out of or from very near it. Afterward the
Connecticut came so near the course of the Merrimack that, with a
little pains, they expected to divert the current of the trade into the
latter river, and its profits from their Dutch neighbors into their own
pockets.
Unlike the Concord, the Merrimack is not a dead but a living stream,
though it has less life within its waters and on its banks. It has a
swift current, and, in this part of its course, a clayey bottom, almost
no weeds, and comparatively few fishes. We looked down into its yellow
water with the more curiosity, who were accustomed to the Nile-like
blackness of the former river. Shad and alewives are taken here in
their season, but salmon, though at one time more numerous than shad,
are now more rare. Bass, also, are taken occasionally; but locks and
dams have proved more or less destructive to the fisheries. The shad
make their appearance early in May, at the same time with the blossoms
of the pyrus, one of the most conspicuous early flowers, which is for
this reason called the shad-blossom. An insect called the shad-fly also
appears at the same time, covering the houses and fences. We are told
that "their greatest run is when the apple-trees are in full blossom.
The old shad return in August; the young, three or four inches long, in
September. These are very fond of flies." A rather picturesque and
luxurious mode of fishing was formerly practised on the Connecticut, at
Bellows Falls, where a large rock divides the stream. "On the steep
sides of the island rock," says Belknap, "hang several arm-chairs,
fastened to ladders, and secured by a counterpoise, in which fishermen
sit to catch salmon and shad with dipping nets." The remains of Indian
weirs, made of large stones, are still to be seen in the Winnipiseogee,
one of the head-waters of this river.
It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these
shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers,
and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in
the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the
sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their
way downward to the sea. "And is it not pretty sport," wrote
Captain
John Smith, who was on this coast as early as 1614, "to pull up
twopence, sixpence, and twelvepence, as fast as you can haul and veer a
line?"—"And what sport doth yield a more pleasing content, and
less
hurt or charge, than angling with a hook, and crossing the sweet air
from isle to isle, over the silent streams of a calm sea."
On the sandy shore, opposite the Glass-house village in Chelmsford, at
the Great Bend where we landed to rest us and gather a few wild plums,
we discovered the campanula rotundifolia, a new flower to us, the
harebell of the poets, which is common to both hemispheres, growing
close to the water. Here, in the shady branches of an apple-tree on the
sand, we took our nooning, where there was not a zephyr to disturb the
repose of this glorious Sabbath day, and we reflected serenely on the
long past and successful labors of Latona.
"So silent is the cessile air,
That every cry and call,
The hills, and dales, and forest fair
Again repeats them all.
"The herds beneath some leafy trees,
Amidst the flowers they lie,
The stable ships upon the seas
Tend up their sails to dry."
As we thus rested in the shade, or rowed leisurely along, we had
recourse, from time to time, to the Gazetteer, which was our Navigator,
and from its bald natural facts extracted the pleasure of poetry.
Beaver River comes in a little lower down, draining the meadows of
Pelham, Windham, and Londonderry. The Scotch-Irish settlers of the
latter town, according to this authority, were the first to introduce
the potato into New England, as well as the manufacture of linen cloth.
Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at
least of the best that is in literature. Indeed, the best books have a
use, like sticks and stones, which is above or beside their design, not
anticipated in the preface, nor concluded in the appendix. Even
Virgil’s poetry serves a very different use to me to-day from what it
did to his contemporaries. It has often an acquired and accidental
value merely, proving that man is still man in the world. It is
pleasant to meet with such still lines as,
"Jam læto turgent in palmite gemmæ";
Now the buds swell on the joyful stem.
or
“Strata jacent passim sua quæque sub arbore poma”;
The apples lie scattered everywhere, each under its tree.
In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature
attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew
and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the
test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.
What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be
in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they
would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can
supply their place.
The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by
setting aside its requisitions. We can, therefore, publish only our
advertisement of it.
There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed, or
in some way musically measured,—is, in form as well as substance,
poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of
mankind need not have one rhythmless line.
Philosophy Interlude
Soon the village of Nashua was out of sight, and the woods were gained
again, and we rowed slowly on before sunset, looking for a solitary
place in which to spend the night. A few evening clouds began to be
reflected in the water and the surface was dimpled only here and there
by a muskrat crossing the stream. We camped at length near Penichook
Brook, on the confines of what is now Nashville, by a deep ravine,
under the skirts of a pine wood, where the dead pine-leaves were our
carpet, and their tawny boughs stretched overhead. But fire and smoke
soon tamed the scene; the rocks consented to be our walls, and the
pines our roof. A woodside was already the fittest locality for us.
The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. Even the oldest
villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them,
more than to the gardens of men. There is something indescribably
inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and
occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the
sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The
very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude
and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background,
where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.
We had found a safe harbor for our boat, and as the sun was setting
carried up our furniture, and soon arranged our house upon the bank,
and while the kettle steamed at the tent door, we chatted of distant
friends and of the sights which we were to behold, and wondered which
way the towns lay from us. Our cocoa was soon boiled, and supper set
upon our chest, and we lengthened out this meal, like old voyageurs,
with our talk. Meanwhile we spread the map on the ground, and read in
the Gazetteer when the first settlers came here and got a township
granted. Then, when supper was done and we had written the journal of
our voyage, we wrapped our buffaloes about us and lay down with our
heads pillowed on our arms listening awhile to the distant baying of a
dog, or the murmurs of the river, or to the wind, which had not gone to
rest:—
The western wind came lumbering in,
Bearing a faint Pacific din,
Our evening mail, swift at the call
Of its Postmaster General;
Laden with news from Californ’,
Whate’er transpired hath since morn,
How wags the world by brier and brake
From hence to Athabasca Lake;—
or half awake and half asleep, dreaming of a star which glimmered
through our cotton roof. Perhaps at midnight one was awakened by a
cricket shrilly singing on his shoulder, or by a hunting spider in his
eye, and was lulled asleep again by some streamlet purling its way
along at the bottom of a wooded and rocky ravine in our neighborhood.
It was pleasant to lie with our heads so low in the grass, and hear
what a tinkling ever-busy laboratory it was. A thousand little artisans
beat on their anvils all night long.
Far in the night as we were falling asleep on the bank of the
Merrimack, we heard some tyro beating a drum incessantly, in
preparation for a country muster, as we learned, and we thought of the
line,—
“When the drum beat at dead of night.”
We could have assured him that his beat would be answered, and the
forces be mustered. Fear not, thou drummer of the night, we too will be
there. And still he drummed on in the silence and the dark. This stray
sound from a far-off sphere came to our ears from time to time, far,
sweet, and significant, and we listened with such an unprejudiced sense
as if for the first time we heard at all. No doubt he was an
insignificant drummer enough, but his music afforded us a prime and
leisure hour, and we felt that we were in season wholly. These simple
sounds related us to the stars. Ay, there was a logic in them so
convincing that the combined sense of mankind could never make me doubt
their conclusions. I stop my habitual thinking, as if the plough had
suddenly run deeper in its furrow through the crust of the world. How
can I go on, who have just stepped over such a bottomless skylight in
the bog of my life. Suddenly old Time winked at me,—Ah, you know me,
you rogue,—and news had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is
in such capital health, I think undoubtedly it will never die. Heal
yourselves, doctors; by God, I live.
Then idle Time ran gadding by
And left me with Eternity alone;
I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the verge of sight,—
I see, smell, taste, hear, feel, that everlasting Something to which we
are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very Selves;
the one historic truth, the most remarkable fact which can become the
distinct and uninvited subject of our thought, the actual glory of the
universe; the only fact which a human being cannot avoid recognizing,
or in some way forget or dispense with.
It doth expand my privacies
To all, and leave me single in the crowd.
I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not
the least doubt that it will stand a good while.
Now chiefly is my natal hour,
And only now my prime of life.
I will not doubt the love untold,
Which not my worth nor want hath bought,
Which wooed me young and wooes me old,
And to this evening hath me brought.
WEDNESDAY
Our course this afternoon was between Manchester and Goffstown.
While we float here, far from that tributary stream on whose banks our
friends and kindred dwell, our thoughts, like the stars, come out of
their horizon still; for there circulates a finer blood than Lavoisier
has discovered the laws of,—the blood, not of kindred merely, but of
kindness, whose pulse still beats at any distance and forever.
True kindness is a pure divine affinity,
Not founded upon human consanguinity.
It is a spirit, not a blood relation,
Superior to family and station.
After years of vain familiarity, some distant gesture or unconscious
behavior, which we remember, speaks to us with more emphasis than the
wisest or kindest words. We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long
passed, and realize that there have been times when our Friends’
thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed
over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as
what we were, but as what we aspired to be. There has just reached us,
it may be, the nobleness of some such silent behavior, not to be
forgotten, not to be remembered, and we shudder to think how it fell on
us cold, though in some true but tardy hour we endeavor to wipe off
these scores.
In my experience, persons, when they are made the subject of
conversation, though with a Friend, are commonly the most prosaic and
trivial of facts. The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to
discuss the character of individuals. Our discourse all runs to
slander, and our limits grow narrower as we advance. How is it that we
are impelled to treat our old Friends so ill when we obtain new ones?
The housekeeper says, I never had any new crockery in my life but I
began to break the old. I say, let us speak of mushrooms and forest
trees rather. Yet we can sometimes afford to remember them in private.
Lately, alas, I knew a gentle boy,
Whose features all were cast in Virtue’s mould,
As one she had designed for Beauty’s toy,
But after manned him for her own strong-hold.
On every side he open was as day,
That you might see no lack of strength within,
For walls and ports do only serve alway
For a pretence to feebleness and sin.
Say not that Cæsar was victorious,
With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame,
In other sense this youth was glorious,
Himself a kingdom wheresoe’er he came.
No strength went out to get him victory,
When all was income of its own accord;
For where he went none other was to see,
But all were parcel of their noble lord.
He forayed like the subtile haze of summer,
That stilly shows fresh landscapes to our eyes,
And revolutions works without a murmur,
Or rustling of a leaf beneath the skies.
So was I taken unawares by this,
I quite forgot my homage to confess;
Yet now am forced to know, though hard it is,
I might have loved him had I loved him less.
Each moment as we nearer drew to each,
A stern respect withheld us farther yet,
So that we seemed beyond each other’s reach,
And less acquainted than when first we met.
We two were one while we did sympathize,
So could we not the simplest bargain drive;
And what avails it now that we are wise,
If absence doth this doubleness contrive?
Eternity may not the chance repeat,
But I must tread my single way alone,
In sad remembrance that we once did meet,
And know that bliss irrevocably gone.
The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing,
For elegy has other subject none;
Each strain of music in my ears shall ring
Knell of departure from that other one.
Make haste and celebrate my tragedy;
With fitting strain resound ye woods and fields;
Sorrow is dearer in such case to me
Than all the joys other occasion yields.
—————
Is’t then too late the damage to repair?
Distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft
The empty husk, and clutched the useless tare,
But in my hands the wheat and kernel left.
If I but love that virtue which he is,
Though it be scented in the morning air,
Still shall we be truest acquaintances,
Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare.
Friendship is evanescent in every man’s experience, and remembered
like heat lightning in past summers. Fair and flitting like a summer
cloud;—there is always some vapor in the air, no matter how long the
drought; there are even April showers. Surely from time to time, for
its vestiges never depart, it floats through our atmosphere. It takes
place, like vegetation in so many materials, because there is such a
law, but always without permanent form, though ancient and familiar as
the sun and moon, and as sure to come again. The heart is forever
inexperienced. They silently gather as by magic, these never failing,
never quite deceiving visions, like the bright and fleecy clouds in the
calmest and clearest days. The Friend is some fair floating isle of
palms eluding the mariner in Pacific seas. Many are the dangers to be
encountered, equinoctial gales and coral reefs, ere he may sail before
the constant trades. But who would not sail through mutiny and storm,
even over Atlantic waves, to reach the fabulous retreating shores of
some continent man? The imagination still clings to the faintest
tradition of
THE ATLANTIDES.
The smothered streams of love, which flow
More bright than Phlegethon, more low,
Island us ever, like the sea,
In an Atlantic mystery.
Our fabled shores none ever reach,
No mariner has found our beach,
Scarcely our mirage now is seen,
And neighboring waves with floating green,
Yet still the oldest charts contain
Some dotted outline of our main;
In ancient times midsummer days
Unto the western islands’ gaze,
To Teneriffe and the Azores,
Have shown our faint and cloud-like shores.
But sink not yet, ye desolate isles,
Anon your coast with commerce smiles,
And richer freights ye’ll furnish far
Than Africa or Malabar.
Be fair, be fertile evermore,
Ye rumored but untrodden shore,
Princes and monarchs will contend
Who first unto your land shall send,
And pawn the jewels of the crown
To call your distant soil their own.
Columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner’s compass,
but neither he nor his successors have found them. We are no nearer
than Plato was. The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this New
World always haunts the outskirts of his time, and walks through the
densest crowd uninterrupted, and as it were in a straight line.
Sea and land are but his neighbors,
And companions in his labors,
Who on the ocean’s verge and firm land’s end
Doth long and truly seek his Friend.
Many men dwell far inland,
But he alone sits on the strand.
Whether he ponders men or books,
Always still he seaward looks,
Marine news he ever reads,
And the slightest glances heeds,
Feels the sea breeze on his cheek,
At each word the landsmen speak,
In every companion’s eye
A sailing vessel doth descry;
In the ocean’s sullen roar
From some distant port he hears,
Of wrecks upon a distant shore,
And the ventures of past years.
Who does not walk on the plain as amid the columns of Tadmore of the
desert? There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has
established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains
its maxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a
rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not
seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of
pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.
However, our fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but
as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and
more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance,
and their actions faintly foretell it. We are inclined to lay the chief
stress on likeness and not on difference, and in foreign bodies we
admit that there are many degrees of warmth below blood heat, but none
of cold above it.
Mencius says: “If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek
them again; if one loses the sentiments of his heart, he does not know
how to seek them again. . . . The duties of practical philosophy
consist only in seeking after those sentiments of the heart which we
have lost; that is all.”
One or two persons come to my house from time to time, there being
proposed to them the faint possibility of intercourse. They are as full
as they are silent, and wait for my plectrum to stir the strings of
their lyre. If they could ever come to the length of a sentence, or
hear one, on that ground they are dreaming of! They speak faintly, and
do not obtrude themselves. They have heard some news, which none, not
even they themselves, can impart. It is a wealth they can bear about
them which can be expended in various ways. What came they out to seek?
No word is oftener on the lips of men than Friendship, and indeed no
thought is more familiar to their aspirations. All men are dreaming of
it, and its drama, which is always a tragedy, is enacted daily. It is the
secret of the universe. You may tread the town, you may wander the
country, and none shall ever speak of it, yet thought is everywhere
busy about it, and the idea of what is possible in this respect affects
our behavior toward all new men and women, and a great many old ones.
Nevertheless, I can remember only two or three essays on this subject
in all literature. No wonder that the Mythology, and Arabian Nights,
and Shakespeare, and Scott’s novels entertain us,—we are poets and
fablers and dramatists and novelists ourselves. We are continually
acting a part in a more interesting drama than any written. We are
dreaming that our Friends are our Friends, and that we are our
Friends’ Friends. Our actual Friends are but distant relations of
those to whom we are pledged. We never exchange more than three words
with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and
feelings almost habitually rise. One goes forth prepared to say, “Sweet
Friends!” and the salutation is, “Damn your eyes!” But never mind;
faint heart never won true Friend. O my Friend, may it come to pass
once, that when you are my Friend I may be yours.
Of what use the friendliest dispositions even, if there are no hours
given to Friendship, if it is forever postponed to unimportant duties
and relations? Friendship is first, Friendship last. But it is equally
impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal.
When they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep them company. How
often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that
we may go and meet their ideal cousins. I would that I were worthy to
be any man’s Friend.
What is commonly honored with the name of Friendship is no very
profound or powerful instinct. Men do not, after all, love their
Friends greatly. I do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to
the verge of insanity by their Friendship for one another. They are not
often transfigured and translated by love in each other’s presence. I
do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a
man. If one abates a little the price of his wood, or gives a neighbor
his vote at town-meeting, or a barrel of apples, or lends him his wagon
frequently, it is esteemed a rare instance of Friendship. Nor do the
farmers’ wives lead lives consecrated to Friendship. I do not see the
pair of farmer Friends of either sex prepared to stand against the
world. There are only two or three couples in history. To say that a
man is your Friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not
your enemy. Most contemplate only what would be the accidental and
trifling advantages of Friendship, as that the Friend can assist in
time of need, by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel; but
he who foresees such advantages in this relation proves himself blind
to its real advantage, or indeed wholly inexperienced in the relation
itself. Such services are particular and menial, compared with the
perpetual and all-embracing service which it is. Even the utmost
good-will and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for
Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but
in melody. We do not wish for Friends to feed and clothe our
bodies,—neighbors are kind enough for that,—but to do the like office
to our spirits. For this few are rich enough, however well disposed
they may be. For the most part we stupidly confound one man with
another. The dull distinguish only races or nations, or at most
classes, but the wise man, individuals. To his Friend a man’s peculiar
character appears in every feature and in every action, and it is thus
drawn out and improved by him.
Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of men.
It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a
saint. It is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnan-
imous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man
with man.--
“Why love among the virtues is not known,
Is that love is them all contract in one.”
All the abuses which are the object of reform with the philanthropist,
the statesman, and the housekeeper are unconsciously amended in the
intercourse of Friends. A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the
compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate
them in us. It takes two to speak the truth,—one to speak, and another
to hear. How can one treat with magnanimity mere wood and stone? If we
dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how
to speak truth. Only lovers know the value and magnanimity of truth,
while traders prize a cheap honesty, and neighbors and acquaintance a
cheap civility. In our daily intercourse with men, our nobler faculties
are dormant and suffered to rust. None will pay us the compliment to
expect nobleness from us. Though we have gold to give, they demand only
copper. We ask our neighbor to suffer himself to be dealt with truly,
sincerely, nobly; but he answers no by his deafness. He does not even
hear this prayer. He says practically, I will be content if you treat
me as “no better than I should be,” as deceitful, mean, dishonest, and
selfish. For the most part, we are contented so to deal and to be dealt
with, and we do not think that for the mass of men there is any truer
and nobler relation possible. A man may have good neighbors, so
called, and acquaintances, and even companions, wife, parents,
brothers, sisters, children, who meet himself and one another on this
ground only. The State does not demand justice of its members, but
thinks that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly
more than rogues practise; and so do the neighborhood and the family.
What is commonly called Friendship even is only a little more honor
among rogues.
But sometimes we are said to love another, that is, to stand in a
true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive the best
from, him. Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in
proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives
are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. There are passages
of affection in our intercourse with mortal men and women, such as no
prophecy had taught us to expect, which transcend our earthly life, and
anticipate Heaven for us. What is this Love that may come right into
the middle of a prosaic Goffstown day, equal to any of the gods? that
discovers a new world, fair and fresh and eternal, occupying the place
of the old one, when to the common eye a dust has settled on the
universe? which world cannot else be reached, and does not exist. What
other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated
than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they were ever
uttered. They are few and rare, indeed, but, like a strain of music,
they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. All other
words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. We should
not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are not competent to hear them
at all times.
The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of
Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends.
They mean associates and confidants merely. “Know that the contrariety
of foe and Friend proceeds from God.” Friendship takes place between
those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural
and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail. Even
speech, at first, necessarily has nothing to do with it; but it follows
after silence, as the buds in the graft do not put forth into leaves
till long after the graft has taken. It is a drama in which the parties
have no part to act. We are all Mussulmen and fatalists in this
respect. Impatient and uncertain lovers think that they must say or do
something kind whenever they meet; they must never be cold. But they
who are Friends do not do what they think they must, but what they
must. Even their Friendship is to some extent but a sublime
phenomenon to them.
Friendship Extended
We lay awake a long while, listening to the murmurs of the brook, in
the angle formed by whose bank with the river our tent was pitched, and
there was a sort of human interest in its story, which ceases not in
freshet or in drought the livelong summer, and the profounder lapse of
the river was quite drowned by its din. But the rill, whose
“Silver sands and pebbles sing
Eternal ditties with the spring,”
is silenced by the first frosts of winter, while mightier streams, on
whose bottom the sun never shines, clogged with sunken rocks and the
ruins of forests, from whose surface comes up no murmur, are strangers
to the icy fetters which bind fast a thousand contributary rills.
I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long before. It was
a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased to give me pain,
though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my dream ideal justice
was at length done me for his suspicions, and I received that
compensation which I had never obtained in my waking hours. I was
unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after I awoke, because in dreams
we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived, and this seemed to have
the authority of a final judgment.
We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as well as some
waking thoughts. Donne sings of one
“Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray.”
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely less
afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream,
than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is
our atonement, measures the degree by which this is separated from an
actual unworthiness. For in dreams we but act a part which must have
been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could
discover some waking consent thereto. If this meanness had not its
foundation in us, why are we grieved at it? In dreams we see ourselves
naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see
others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even
its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever-wakeful
authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have
dreamed of such a thing. Our truest life is when we are in dreams
awake.
“And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft,
A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,
And ever-drizzling raine upon the loft,
Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.
No other noyse, nor people’s troublous cryes,
As still are wont t’ annoy the walled towne,
Might there be heard; but careless Quiet lyes
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes.”
THURSDAY
“He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone,
Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.
* * * * *
Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;
There the red morning touched him with its light.
* * * * *
Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth,—his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there’s his road,
By God’s own light illumined and foreshowed.”
EMERSON.
When we awoke this morning, we heard the faint, deliberate, and ominous
sound of rain-drops on our cotton roof. The rain had pattered all
night, and now the whole country wept, the drops falling in the river,
and on the alders, and in the pastures, and instead of any bow in the
heavens, there was the trill of the hair-bird all the morning. The
cheery faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole
woodland choir beside. When we first stepped abroad, a flock of sheep,
led by their rams, came rushing down a ravine in our rear, with
heedless haste and unreserved frisking, as if unobserved by man, from
some higher pasture where they had spent the night, to taste the
herbage by the river-side; but when their leaders caught sight of our
white tent through the mist, struck with sudden astonishment, with
their fore-feet braced, they sustained the rushing torrent in their
rear, and the whole flock stood stock-still, endeavoring to solve the
mystery in their sheepish brains. At length, concluding that it boded
no mischief to them, they spread themselves out quietly over the field.
We learned afterward that we had pitched our tent on the very spot
which a few summers before had been occupied by a party of Penobscots.
We could see rising before us through the mist a dark conical eminence
called Hooksett Pinnacle, a landmark to boatmen, and also Uncannunuc
Mountain, broad off on the west side of the river.
This was the limit of our voyage, for a few hours more in the rain
would have taken us to the last of the locks, and our boat was too
heavy to be dragged around the long and numerous rapids which would
occur. On foot, however, we continued up along the bank, feeling our
way with a stick through the showery and foggy day, and climbing over
the slippery logs in our path with as much pleasure and buoyancy as in
brightest sunshine; scenting the fragrance of the pines and the wet
clay under our feet, and cheered by the tones of invisible waterfalls;
with visions of toadstools, and wandering frogs, and festoons of moss
hanging from the spruce-trees, and thrushes flitting silent under the
leaves; our road still holding together through that wettest of
weather, like faith, while we confidently followed its lead. We managed
to keep our thoughts dry, however, and only our clothes were wet. It
was altogether a cloudy and drizzling day, with occasional brightenings
in the mist, when the trill of the tree-sparrow seemed to be ushering
in sunny hours.
“Nothing that naturally happens to man can hurt him, earthquakes and
thunder-storms not excepted,” said a man of genius, who at this time
lived a few miles farther on our road. When compelled by a shower to
take shelter under a tree, we may improve that opportunity for a more
minute inspection of some of Nature’s works. I have stood under a tree
in the woods half a day at a time, during a heavy rain in the summer,
and yet employed myself happily and profitably there prying with
microscopic eye into the crevices of the bark or the leaves or the
fungi at my feet. “Riches are the attendants of the miser; and the
heavens rain plenteously upon the mountains.” I can fancy that it would
be a luxury to stand up to one’s chin in some retired swamp a whole
summer day, scenting the wild honeysuckle and bilberry blows, and
lulled by the minstrelsy of gnats and mosquitoes! A day passed in the
society of those Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of
Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry
vines, and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds. Say twelve hours of
genial and familiar converse with the leopard frog; the sun to rise
behind alder and dogwood, and climb buoyantly to his meridian of two
hands’ breadth, and finally sink to rest behind some bold western
hummock. To hear the evening chant of the mosquito from a thousand
green chapels, and the bittern begin to boom from some concealed fort
like a sunset gun!—Surely one may as profitably be soaked in the juices
of a swamp for one day as pick his way dry-shod over sand. Cold and
damp,—are they not as rich experience as warmth and dryness?
At present, the drops come trickling down the stubble while we lie
drenched on a bed of withered wild oats, by the side of a bushy hill,
and the gathering in of the clouds, with the last rush and dying breath
of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the
country over, enhance the sense of inward comfort and sociableness.
The birds draw closer and are more familiar under the thick foliage,
seemingly composing new strains upon their roosts against the sunshine.
What were the amusements of the drawing-room and the library in
comparison, if we had them here? We should still sing as of old,—
My books I’d fain cast off, I cannot read,
’Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,
And will not mind to hit their proper targe.
Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,
Our Shakespeare’s life were rich to live again,
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,
Nor Shakespeare’s books, unless his books were men.
Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
Between the ants upon this hummock’s crown?
Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,
If red or black the gods will favor most,
Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,
Struggling to heave some rock against the host.
Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour,
For now I’ve business with this drop of dew,
And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower,—
I’ll meet him shortly when the sky is blue.
This bed of herd’s-grass and wild oats was spread
Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use,
A clover tuft is pillow for my head,
And violets quite overtop my shoes.
And now the cordial clouds have shut all in
And gently swells the wind to say all’s well
The scattered drops are falling fast and thin,
Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.
I am well drenched upon my bed of oats;
But see that globe come rolling down its stem
Now like a lonely planet there it floats,
And now it sinks into my garment’s hem.
Drip drip the trees for all the country round,
And richness rare distils from every bough,
The wind alone it is makes every sound,
Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.
For shame the sun will never show himself,
Who could not with his beams e’er melt me so,
My dripping locks,—they would become an elf,
Who in a beaded coat does gayly go.
The Pinnacle is a small wooded hill which rises very abruptly to the
height of about two hundred feet, near the shore at Hooksett Falls. As
Uncannunuc Mountain is perhaps the best point from which to view the
valley of the Merrimack, so this hill affords the best view of the
river itself. I have sat upon its summit, a precipitous rock only a few
rods long, in fairer weather, when the sun was setting and filling the
river valley with a flood of light. You can see up and down the
Merrimack several miles each way. The broad and straight river, full
of light and life, with its sparkling and foaming falls, the islet which
divides the stream, the village of Hooksett on the shore almost
directly under your feet, so near that you can converse with its
inhabitants or throw a stone into its yards, the woodland lake at its
western base, and the mountains in the north and northeast, make a
scene of rare beauty and completeness, which the traveller should take
pains to behold.
We were hospitably entertained in Concord, New Hampshire, which we
persisted in calling New Concord, as we had been wont, to distinguish
it from our native town, from which we had been told that it was named
and in part originally settled. This would have been the proper place
to conclude our voyage, uniting Concord with Concord by these
meandering rivers, but our boat was moored some miles below its port.
The richness of the intervals at Penacook, now Concord, New Hampshire,
had been observed by explorers, and, according to the historian of Hav-
erhill, in the “year 1726, considerable progress was made in the settle-
ment, and a road was cut through the wilderness from Haverhill to Pen-
acook. In the fall of 1727, the first family, that of Captain Ebenezer
Eastman, moved into the place. His team was driven by Jacob Shute,
who was by birth a Frenchman, and he is said to have been the first
person who drove a team through the wilderness. Soon after, says
tradition, one Ayer, a lad of 18, drove a team consisting of ten yoke
of oxen to Penacook, swam the river, and ploughed a portion of the
interval. He is supposed to have been the first person who ploughed
land in that place. After he had completed his work, he started on his
return at sunrise, drowned a yoke of oxen while recrossing the river,
and arrived at Haverhill about midnight. The crank of the first saw-
mill was manufactured in Haverhill, and carried to Penacook on a
horse.”
But we found that the frontiers were not this way any longer. This
generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises.
Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before
us. We cannot now have the pleasure of erecting the last house; that
was long ago set up in the suburbs of Astoria City, and our boundaries
have literally been run to the South Sea, according to the old patents.
But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range,
are still as shallow as ever. Undoubtedly, as a Western orator said,
“Men generally live over about the same surface; some live long and
narrow, and others live broad and short”; but it is all superficial
living. A worm is as good a traveller as a grasshopper or a cricket,
and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away
from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing
before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm
escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. The frontiers
are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a
fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wild-
erness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or,
farther still, between him and it. Let him build himself a log-house
with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old
French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or
whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his
scalp if he can.
We now no longer sailed or floated on the river, but trod the
unyielding land like pilgrims. Sadi tells who may travel; among others,
“A common mechanic, who can earn a subsistence by the industry of his
hand, and shall not have to stake his reputation for every morsel of
bread, as philosophers have said.” He may travel who can subsist on the
wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country. A man may travel
fast enough and earn his living on the road. I have at times been
applied to to do work when on a journey; to do tinkering and repair
clocks, when I had a knapsack on my back. A man once applied to me to
go into a factory, stating conditions and wages, observing that I
succeeded in shutting the window of a railroad car in which we were
travelling, when the other passengers had failed. “Hast thou not heard
of a Sufi, who was hammering some nails into the sole of his sandal; an
officer of cavalry took him by the sleeve, saying, Come along and shoe
my horse.” Farmers have asked me to assist them in haying, when I was
passing their fields. A man once applied to me to mend his umbrella,
taking me for an umbrella-mender, because, being on a journey, I
carried an umbrella in my hand while the sun shone. Another wished to
buy a tin cup of me, observing that I had one strapped to my belt, and
a sauce-pan on my back. The cheapest way to travel, and the way to
travel the farthest in the shortest distance, is to go afoot, carrying
a dipper, a spoon, and a fish-line, some Indian meal, some salt, and
some sugar. When you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and
cook them; or you can boil a hasty-pudding; or you can buy a loaf of
bread at a farmer’s house for fourpence, moisten it in the next brook
that crosses the road, and dip into it your sugar,—this alone will last
you a whole day;—or, if you are accustomed to heartier living, you can
buy a quart of milk for two cents, crumb your bread or cold pudding
into it, and eat it with your own spoon out of your own dish. Any one
of these things I mean, not all together. I have travelled thus some
hundreds of miles without taking any meal in a house, sleeping on the
ground when convenient, and found it cheaper, and in many respects
more profitable, than staying at home. So that some have inquired why it
would not be best to travel always. But I never thought of travelling
simply as a means of getting a livelihood. A simple woman down in
Tyngsborough, at whose house I once stopped to get a draught of water,
when I said, recognizing the bucket, that I had stopped there nine
years before for the same purpose, asked if I was not a traveller,
supposing that I had been travelling ever since, and had now come round
again; that travelling was one of the professions, more or less
productive, which her husband did not follow. But continued travelling
is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the
shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean
up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that
the after-life of those who have travelled much is very pathetic. True
and sincere travelling is no pastime, but it is as serious as the
grave, or any part of the human journey, and it requires a long
probation to be broken into it. I do not speak of those that travel
sitting, the sedentary travellers whose legs hang dangling the while,
mere idle symbols of the fact, any more than when we speak of sitting
hens we mean those that sit standing, but I mean those to whom
travelling is life for the legs, and death too, at last. The traveller
must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements,
the principal powers that be for him. He shall experience at last that
old threat of his mother fulfilled, that he shall be skinned alive. His
sores shall gradually deepen themselves that they may heal inwardly,
while he gives no rest to the sole of his foot, and at night weariness
must be his pillow, that so he may acquire experience against his rainy
days.—So was it with us.
Sometimes we lodged at an inn in the woods, where trout-fishers from
distant cities had arrived before us, and where, to our astonishment,
the settlers dropped in at nightfall to have a chat and hear the news,
though there was but one road, and no other house was visible,—as if
they had come out of the earth. There we sometimes read old newspapers,
who never before read new ones, and in the rustle of their leaves heard
the dashing of the surf along the Atlantic shore, instead of the sough
of the wind among the pines. But then walking had given us an appetite
even for the least palatable and nutritious food.
Philosophical Interlude 4
We had already passed by broad daylight the scene of our encampment at
Coos Falls, and at length we pitched our camp on the west bank, in the
northern part of Merrimack, nearly opposite to the large island on
which we had spent the noon in our way up the river.
There we went to bed that summer evening, on a sloping shelf in the
bank, a couple of rods from our boat, which was drawn up on the sand,
and just behind a thin fringe of oaks which bordered the river; without
having disturbed any inhabitants but the spiders in the grass, which
came out by the light of our lamp, and crawled over our buffaloes. When
we looked out from under the tent, the trees were seen dimly through
the mist, and a cool dew hung upon the grass, which seemed to rejoice
in the night, and with the damp air we inhaled a solid fragrance.
Having eaten our supper of hot cocoa and bread and watermelon, we soon
grew weary of conversing, and writing in our journals, and, putting out
the lantern which hung from the tent-pole, fell asleep.
Unfortunately, many things have been omitted which should have been
recorded in our journal; for though we made it a rule to set down all
our experiences therein, yet such a resolution is very hard to keep,
for the important experience rarely allows us to remember such
obligations, and so indifferent things get recorded, while that is
frequently neglected. It is not easy to write in a journal what
interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us.
Whenever we awoke in the night, still eking out our dreams with
half-awakened thoughts, it was not till after an interval, when the
wind breathed harder than usual, flapping the curtains of the tent, and
causing its cords to vibrate, that we remembered that we lay on the
bank of the Merrimack, and not in our chamber at home. With our heads
so low in the grass, we heard the river whirling and sucking, and
lapsing downward, kissing the shore as it went, sometimes rippling
louder than usual, and again its mighty current making only a slight
limpid, trickling sound, as if our water-pail had sprung a leak, and
the water were flowing into the grass by our side. The wind, rustling
the oaks and hazels, impressed us like a wakeful and inconsiderate
person up at midnight, moving about, and putting things to rights,
occasionally stirring up whole drawers full of leaves at a puff. There
seemed to be a great haste and preparation throughout Nature, as for a
distinguished visitor; all her aisles had to be swept in the night, by
a thousand hand-maidens, and a thousand pots to be boiled for the next
day’s feasting;—such a whispering bustle, as if ten thousand fairies
made their fingers fly, silently sewing at the new carpet with which
the earth was to be clothed, and the new drapery which was to adorn the
trees. And then the wind would lull and die away, and we like it fell
asleep again.
