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A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

by Henry David Thoreau · English · Gutenberg #4232 · 665,612 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Author: Henry David Thoreau


        
Release date: July 1, 2003 [eBook #4232]
                Most recently updated: February 10, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4232

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS ***

[Illustration]




A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

by Henry David Thoreau

AUTHOR OF “WALDEN,” ETC.


Contents

 CONCORD RIVER
 SATURDAY
 SUNDAY
 MONDAY
 TUESDAY
 WEDNESDAY
 THURSDAY
 FRIDAY




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;
Quæ, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa;
In mare perveniunt partim, campoque recepta
Liberioris aquæ, 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
CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have
been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. 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
authority, “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 Framingham, and between Sudbury and
Wayland, 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 farther to the north and
west, goes out at the northeast 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, command 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 hundred brooks, and farm-houses, and barns,
and haystacks, you never saw before, and men everywhere, 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 uneasy 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 haystacks; and countless
mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny windy shore;
cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving 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 until 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 anywhere on the Northwest 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 Shakespeare, 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 harrowing, and ploughing, 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, perennial, 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 referred 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 sufficient 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
Merrimack, it appears to have been properly named Musketaquid, or
Meadow River, by the Indians. For the most part, it creeps through
broad meadows, adorned with scattered 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 farther 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 territory 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.

Let us here read what old Johnson says of these meadows in his
“Wonder-working Providence,” which gives the account of New England
from 1628 to 1652, and see how matters looked to him. He says of the
Twelfth Church of Christ gathered at Concord: “This town is seated upon
a fair fresh river, whose rivulets are filled with fresh marsh, and her
streams with fish, it being a branch of that large river of Merrimack.
Allwifes and shad in their season come up to this town, but salmon and
dace cannot come up, by reason of the rocky falls, which causeth their
meadows to lie much covered with water, the which these people,
together with their neighbor town, have several times essayed to cut
through but cannot, yet it may be turned another way with an hundred
pound charge as it appeared.” As to their farming he says: “Having laid
out their estate upon cattle at 5 to 20 pound a cow, when they came to
winter them with inland hay, and feed upon such wild fother as was
never cut before, they could not hold out the winter, but, ordinarily
the first or second year after their coming up to a new plantation,
many of their cattle died.” And this from the same author “Of the
Planting of the 19th Church in the Mattachusets’ Government, called
Sudbury”: “This year [does he mean 1654] the town and church of Christ
at Sudbury began to have the first foundation stones laid, taking up
her station in the inland country, as her elder sister Concord had
formerly done, lying further up the same river, being furnished with
great plenty of fresh marsh, but, it lying very low is much indamaged
with land floods, insomuch that when the summer proves wet they lose
part of their hay; yet are they so sufficiently provided that they take
in cattle of other towns to winter.”

The sluggish artery of the Concord meadows steals thus unobserved
through the town, without a murmur or a pulse-beat, its general course
from southwest to northeast, and its length about fifty miles; a huge
volume of matter, ceaselessly rolling through the plains and valleys of
the substantial earth with the moccasoned 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 journeying 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 obstacles 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, watching 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 erelong to die and go down likewise; the
shining pebbles, not yet anxious to better their condition, the chips
and weeds, and occasional 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 anchor 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 bulrushes courtesied 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 reference 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 answer 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 plough.”


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 enterprises, 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 concealed 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 remoteness 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 peaceful 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 moccason print, have levelled a fertile and juicy place in
nature.

On Ponkawtasset, since, we took our way,
Down this still stream to far Billericay,
A poet wise has settled, whose fine ray
Doth often 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 paled, though out of sight,
But like the sun they shine forever bright;
Ay, _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, floating 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 or a bream
from the covert of the pads, 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 (_Salix Purshiana_)
lay along the surface of the water in masses of light green foliage,
interspersed with the large balls of the button-bush. The small
rose-colored polygonum raised its head proudly above the water on
either hand, and flowering at this season and in these localities, in
front of dense fields of the white species 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 themselves
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 purpureum_, 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 farther in the fields or higher on
the bank were seen the purple Gerardia, 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 still a dull yellow beam from the ranks of tansy,
now past 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 species 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 southwest lay the quiet village, left alone under its
elms and buttonwoods in mid afternoon; and the hills, notwithstanding
their blue, ethereal faces, seemed to cast a saddened eye on their old
playfellows; but, turning short to the north, we bade adieu to their
familiar outlines, and addressed ourselves to new scenes and
adventures. Naught was familiar but the heavens, from under whose roof
the voyageur never passes; 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 surface 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
willows, 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
inhabitants 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 knowledges, 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, meanwhile, stands in
three feet of water, under the same summer’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 Newcastle, 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 communication 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 seaside, 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 fertile 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 everywhere 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 melted 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 curious, 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 inexperienced 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 swallowing 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, suffering 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 element, but only by
letting the fingers gradually close about 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, besides 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 mottled 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 flavescens_, which name describes well the
gleaming, golden reflections of its scales as it is drawn out of the
water, its red gills standing out in vain in the thin element, is one
of the handsomest and most regularly formed of our fishes, and at such
a moment as this reminds us of the fish in the picture 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. Old Josselyn in his “New
England’s Rarities,” published in 1672, mentions the Perch or River
Partridge.

The Chivin, Dace, Roach, Cousin Trout, or whatever else it is called,
_Leuciscus pulchellus_, white and red, always 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 silvery
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 atmosphere. 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 dolphin 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.

The Dace, _Leuciscus argenteus_, is a slight silvery minnow, found
generally in the middle of the stream, where the current is most rapid,
and frequently confounded with the last named.

The Shiner, _Leuciscus crysoleucas_, 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 reticulatus_, the swiftest, wariest, and most
ravenous of fishes, which Josselyn calls the Fresh-Water or River Wolf,
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 stomach. 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, sometimes 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, inhabiting 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 Bostonienses_ and _tuberculati_, 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, _Muraena Bostoniensis_, the only species of eel
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
meadow 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 circles 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 scenery of the river bottoms
worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’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 conspicuous, look more
like art than anything 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 undescribed. 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 destruction of the fishery, that
those who at that time represented the interests of the fishermen and
the fishes, remembering 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 elsewhere, 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 creditably, not
skulking through the meadows 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 horseback 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 celebrated
train-band of this town, whose untrained ancestors stood creditably at
Concord North Bridge. Their captain, 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 manœuvres of a
soldier’s wit and unlicensed jesting, that May day; for their captain,
forgetting his own appointment, 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, unless it be one brief page of hard but unquestionable
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 Account 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 necessaries of life in those days; with salmon, shad, and
alewives, fresh and pickled, he was thereafter independent on the
groceries. Rather a preponderance of the fluid elements; but such is
the fisherman’s nature. I can faintly remember to have seen this same
fisher in my earliest youth, still as near the river as he could get,
with uncertain undulatory step, after so many things had gone down
stream, swinging a scythe in the meadow, his bottle 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 Cæsar”;—


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 instructions, 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 detached. 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 spawning season. Away with the
superficial and selfish phil-_anthropy_ 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
erelong 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 mayst 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 sometimes 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; without new
attraction in the heavens, without freshet or visible 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 Bridge, 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 draft 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
wilderness; a place for fauns and satyrs, and where bats hung all day
to the rocks, and at evening flitted over the water, and fire-flies
husbanded their light under the grass and leaves against the night.
When we had pitched our tent on the hillside, 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 stepping 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 throttled 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 sudden 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 patient 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—wo—w—w. Even
in a retired and uninhabited district like this, it was a sufficiency
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 ancient 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 would 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 Merrimack.”

SIEUR DE MONTS, _Relations of the jesuits_, 1604.

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 dispersed, leaving a slight steam only to curl along the
surface 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, flowing between gentle hills and sometimes
cliffs, and well wooded all the way. It was a long woodland lake
bordered 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 clipt 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 surface 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
below 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 uncertain 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 mirror to its
foot and makes it visible. The stillness was intense and almost
conscious, as if it were a natural Sabbath, and we fancied that the
morning was the evening of a celestial day. 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 picturesque, seemed a fit drapery
to hang over fairy-land. The world seemed decked for some holiday 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 actually thus fair and
distinct? All our lives want a suitable 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
limitless horizon. Character always secures for itself this advantage,
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. Wherever the trees and skies are reflected, there is more
than Atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground. We notice
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, floating 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
themselves 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, eying the wondrous 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, Billerica, settled not
long ago, and the children still bear the names of the first settlers
in this late “howling wilderness”; 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, named from
the English Billericay, and whose Indian name was Shawshine. 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,—ay, 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 plantations
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 selectmen” 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 fatigue 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. 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, muskrat, 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 themselves along his woodland road, they too seeking “freedom
to worship God” in their way. And thus he plants a town. The white
man’s mullein soon reigned in Indian cornfields, 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 unnoticed,
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 calculating; 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 endures, 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 ploughs up his bones. And here town
records, old, tattered, time-worn, weather-stained chronicles, contain
the Indian sachem’s mark perchance, an arrow or a beaver, and the few
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
Saxons 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 aspect, 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 inhabitants 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
experience, 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 vision; 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 ploughs? I cut another furrow than you see. Where the off ox
treads, there is it not, it is farther 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, Derwent, and Winandermere, which are to him now instead of
the Acropolis and Parthenon, of Baiæ, and Athens with its sea-walls,
and Arcadia and Tempe.

Greece, who am I that should remember thee,
Thy Marathon and thy Thermopylæ?
Is my life vulgar, my fate mean,
Which on these golden memories can lean?


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 anything 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 cornfields 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 remoter
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 intercourse 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
familiar. 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 incursion 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 chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why he
will not exchange his savageness for civilization. Nations are not
whimsical. Steel and blankets are strong temptations; but the Indian
does well to continue Indian.

After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been
out early on a foggy morning, and heard the cry of an owl in a
neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by
science or by literature. None of the feathered race has yet realized
my youthful conceptions of the woodland depths. I had seen the red
Election-bird brought from their recesses on my comrades’ string, and
fancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling
colors, like the tints of evening, in proportion as I advanced farther
into the darkness and solitude of the forest. Still less have I seen
such strong and wilderness tints on any poet’s string.

These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more
venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its
primitive and simple form; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun
and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and
invented when these were invented. We do not know their John Gutenberg,
or Richard Arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have
been gradually learned and taught. According to Gower,—

“And Iadahel, as saith the boke,
Firste made nette, and fishes toke.
Of huntyng eke he fond the chace,
Whiche nowe is knowe in many place;
A tent of clothe, with corde and stake,
He sette up first, and did it make.”


Also, Lydgate says:—

“Jason first sayled, in story it is tolde,
Toward Colchos, to wynne the flees of golde,
Ceres the Goddess fond first the tilthe of londe;
*    *    *    *   *
Also, Aristeus fonde first the usage
Of mylke, and cruddis, and of honey swote;
Peryodes, for grete avauntage,
From flyntes smote fuyre, daryng in the roote.”


We read that Aristeus “obtained of Jupiter and Neptune, that the
pestilential heat of the dog-days, wherein was great mortality, should
be mitigated with wind.” This is one of those dateless benefits
conferred on man, which have no record in our vulgar day, though we
still find some similitude to them in our dreams, in which we have a
more liberal and juster apprehension of things, unconstrained by habit,
which is then in some measure put off, and divested of memory, which we
call history.

According to fable, when the island of Ægina was depopulated by
sickness, at the instance of Æacus, Jupiter turned the ants into men,
that is, as some think, he made men of the inhabitants who lived meanly
like ants. This is perhaps the fullest history of those early days
extant.

The fable which is naturally and truly composed, so as to satisfy the
imagination, ere it addresses the understanding, beautiful though
strange as a wild-flower, is to the wise man an apothegm, and admits of
his most generous interpretation. When we read that Bacchus made the
Tyrrhenian mariners mad, so that they leapt into the sea, mistaking it
for a meadow full of flowers, and so became dolphins, we are not
concerned about the historical truth of this, but rather a higher
poetical truth. We seem to hear the music of a thought, and care not if
the understanding be not gratified. For their beauty, consider the
fables of Narcissus, of Endymion, of Memnon son of Morning, the
representative of all promising youths who have died a premature death,
and whose memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning; the
beautiful stories of Phaeton, and of the Sirens whose isle shone afar
off white with the bones of unburied men; and the pregnant ones of Pan,
Prometheus, and the Sphinx; and that long list of names which have
already become part of the universal language of civilized men, and
from proper are becoming common names or nouns,—the Sibyls, the
Eumenides, the Parcæ, the Graces, the Muses, Nemesis, &c.

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest
sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and
roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate
the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be
only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add
some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately
discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astræa, that the Virgin who
was driven from earth to heaven at the end of the golden age, may have
her local habitation in the heavens more distinctly assigned her,—for
the slightest recognition of poetic worth is significant. By such slow
aggregation has mythology grown from the first. The very nursery tales
of this generation, were the nursery tales of primeval races. They
migrate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded
into the “tale divine” of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme. This
is an approach to that universal language which men have sought in
vain. This fond reiteration of the oldest expressions of truth by the
latest posterity, content with slightly and religiously retouching the
old material, is the most impressive proof of a common humanity.

All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and
Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all. All men are
children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and
wakes them in the morning. Joseph Wolff, the missionary, distributed
copies of Robinson Crusoe, translated into Arabic, among the Arabs, and
they made a great sensation. “Robinson Crusoe’s adventures and wisdom,”
says he, “were read by Mahometans in the market-places of Sanaa,
Hodyeda, and Loheya, and admired and believed!” On reading the book,
the Arabians exclaimed, “O, that Robinson Crusoe must have been a great
prophet!”

To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and
biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it
contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and
there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom
writes it. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a
thousand years. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day
without the aid of posterity. In how few words, for instance, the
Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a
sentence for our classical dictionary,—and then, perchance, have stuck
up their names to shine in some corner of the firmament. We moderns, on
the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and
history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which itself is but
materials to serve for a mythology. How many volumes folio would the
Life and Labors of Prometheus have filled, if perchance it had fallen,
as perchance it did first, in days of cheap printing! Who knows what
shape the fable of Columbus will at length assume, to be confounded
with that of Jason and the expedition of the Argonauts. And
Franklin,—there may be a line for him in the future classical
dictionary, recording what that demigod did, and referring him to some
new genealogy. “Son of —— and ——. He aided the Americans to gain their
independence, instructed mankind in economy, and drew down lightning
from the clouds.”

The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to
have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and
history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be
made to express a variety of truths. As if they were the skeletons of
still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood
they are for the time made to wear. It is like striving to make the
sun, or the wind, or the sea symbols to signify exclusively the
particular thoughts of our day. But what signifies it? In the mythus a
superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men
as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn. In the history of the human
mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of
men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet,
keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this
auroral atmosphere.

As we said before, the Concord is a dead stream, but its scenery is the
more suggestive to the contemplative voyager, and this day its water
was fuller of reflections than our pages even. Just before it reaches
the falls in Billerica, it is contracted, and becomes swifter and
shallower, with a yellow pebbly bottom, hardly passable for a
canal-boat, leaving the broader and more stagnant portion above like a
lake among the hills. All through the Concord, Bedford, and Billerica
meadows we had heard no murmur from its stream, except where some
tributary runnel tumbled in,—

Some tumultuous little rill,
    Purling round its storied pebble,
Tinkling to the selfsame tune,
From September until June,
    Which no drought doth e’er enfeeble.

Silent flows the parent stream,
    And if rocks do lie below,
Smothers with her waves the din,
As it were a youthful sin,
    Just as still, and just as slow.


But now at length we heard this staid and primitive river rushing to
her fall, like any rill. We here left its channel, just above the
Billerica Falls, and entered the canal, which runs, or rather is
conducted, six miles through the woods to the Merrimack, at Middlesex,
and as we did not care to loiter in this part of our voyage, while one
ran along the tow-path drawing the boat by a cord, the other kept it
off the shore with a pole, so that we accomplished the whole distance
in little more than an hour. This canal, which is the oldest in the
country, and has even an antique look beside the more modern railroads,
is fed by the Concord, so that we were still floating on its familiar
waters. It is so much water which the river _lets_ for the advantage of
commerce. There appeared some want of harmony in its scenery, since it
was not of equal date with the woods and meadows through which it is
led, and we missed the conciliatory influence of time on land and
water; but in the lapse of ages, Nature will recover and indemnify
herself, and gradually plant fit shrubs and flowers along its borders.
Already the kingfisher sat upon a pine over the water, and the bream
and pickerel swam below. Thus all works pass directly out of the hands
of the architect into the hands of Nature, to be perfected.

It was a retired and pleasant route, without houses or travellers,
except some young men who were lounging upon a bridge in Chelmsford,
who leaned impudently over the rails to pry into our concerns, but we
caught the eye of the most forward, and looked at him till he was
visibly discomfited. Not that there was any peculiar efficacy in our
look, but rather a sense of shame left in him which disarmed him.

It is a very true and expressive phrase, “He looked daggers at me,” for
the first pattern and prototype of all daggers must have been a glance
of the eye. First, there was the glance of Jove’s eye, then his fiery
bolt, then, the material gradually hardening, tridents, spears,
javelins, and finally, for the convenience of private men, daggers,
krisses, and so forth, were invented. It is wonderful how we get about
the streets without being wounded by these delicate and glancing
weapons, a man can so nimbly whip out his rapier, or without being
noticed carry it unsheathed. Yet it is rare that one gets seriously
looked at.

As we passed under the last bridge over the canal, just before reaching
the Merrimack, the people coming out of church paused to look at us
from above, and apparently, so strong is custom, indulged in some
heathenish comparisons; but we were the truest observers of this sunny
day. According to Hesiod,

        “The seventh is a holy day,
For then Latona brought forth golden-rayed Apollo,”


and by our reckoning this was the seventh day of the week, and not the
first. I find among the papers of an old Justice of the Peace and
Deacon of the town of Concord, this singular memorandum, which is worth
preserving as a relic of an ancient custom. After reforming the
spelling and grammar, it runs as follows: “Men that travelled with
teams on the Sabbath, Dec. 18th, 1803, were Jeremiah Richardson and
Jonas Parker, both of Shirley. They had teams with rigging such as is
used to carry barrels, and they were travelling westward. Richardson
was questioned by the Hon. Ephraim Wood, Esq., and he said that Jonas
Parker was his fellow-traveller, and he further said that a Mr. Longley
was his employer, who promised to bear him out.” We were the men that
were gliding northward, this Sept. 1st, 1839, with still team, and
rigging not the most convenient to carry barrels, unquestioned by any
Squire or Church Deacon and ready to bear ourselves out if need were.
In the latter part of the seventeenth century, according to the
historian of Dunstable, “Towns were directed to erect ‘_a cage_’ near
the meeting-house, and in this all offenders against the sanctity of
the Sabbath were confined.” Society has relaxed a little from its
strictness, one would say, but I presume that there is not less
_religion_ than formerly. If the _ligature_ is found to be loosened in
one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another.

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must
content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is
slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be. The geologists
tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are
organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to
be referred to the Noachian deluge. I am not sure but I should betake
myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than
to my country’s God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new
attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more
divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious
and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on
nature, as many a god of the Greeks. I should fear the infinite power
and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal, hardly as yet
apotheosized, so wholly masculine, with no Sister Juno, no Apollo, no
Venus, nor Minerva, to intercede for me, θυμῷ φιλέουσά τε, κηδομένη τε.
The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of
men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In
my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy
face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook,
his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is
not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of
New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized
countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is
the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men
reverence one another, not yet God. If I thought that I could speak
with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I
should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most
civil and humane, but I may be mistaken. Every people have gods to suit
their circumstances; the Society Islanders had a god called Toahitu,
“in shape like a dog; he saved such as were in danger of falling from
rocks and trees.” I think that we can do without him, as we have not
much climbing to do. Among them a man could make himself a god out of a
piece of wood in a few minutes, which would frighten him out of his
wits.

I fancy that some indefatigable spinster of the old school, who had the
supreme felicity to be born in “days that tried men’s souls,” hearing
this, may say with Nestor, another of the old school, “But you are
younger than I. For time was when I conversed with greater men than
you. For not at any time have I seen such men, nor shall see them, as
Perithous, and Dryas, and ποιμένα λαῶν,” that is probably Washington,
sole “Shepherd of the People.” And when Apollo has now six times rolled
westward, or seemed to roll, and now for the seventh time shows his
face in the east, eyes wellnigh glazed, long glassed, which have
fluctuated only between lamb’s wool and worsted, explore ceaselessly
some good sermon book. For six days shalt thou labor and do all thy
knitting, but on the seventh, forsooth, thy reading. Happy we who can
bask in this warm September sun, which illumines all creatures, as well
when they rest as when they toil, not without a feeling of gratitude;
whose life is as blameless, how blameworthy soever it may be, on the
Lord’s Mona-day as on his Suna-day.

There are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at
any of them? What man believes, God believes. Long as I have lived, and
many blasphemers as I have heard and seen, I have never yet heard or
witnessed any direct and conscious blasphemy or irreverence; but of
indirect and habitual, enough. Where is the man who is guilty of direct
and personal insolence to Him that made him?

One memorable addition to the old mythology is due to this era,—the
Christian fable. With what pains, and tears, and blood these centuries
have woven this and added it to the mythology of mankind. The new
Prometheus. With what miraculous consent, and patience, and persistency
has this mythus been stamped on the memory of the race! It would seem
as if it were in the progress of our mythology to dethrone Jehovah, and
crown Christ in his stead.

If it is not a tragical life we live, then I know not what to call it.
Such a story as that of Jesus Christ,—the history of Jerusalem, say,
being a part of the Universal History. The naked, the embalmed,
unburied death of Jerusalem amid its desolate hills,—think of it. In
Tasso’s poem I trust some things are sweetly buried. Consider the
snappish tenacity with which they preach Christianity still. What are
time and space to Christianity, eighteen hundred years, and a new
world?—that the humble life of a Jewish peasant should have force to
make a New York bishop so bigoted. Forty-four lamps, the gift of kings,
now burning in a place called the Holy Sepulchre;—a church-bell
ringing;—some unaffected tears shed by a pilgrim on Mount Calvary
within the week.—

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, when I forget thee, may my right hand forget her
cunning.”

“By the waters of Babylon there we sat down, and we wept when we
remembered Zion.”

I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or
Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. It is necessary
not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the
life of Christ. I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when
they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am
willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love
is the main thing, and I like him too. “God is the letter Ku, as well
as Khu.” Why need Christians be still intolerant and superstitious? The
simple-minded sailors were unwilling to cast overboard Jonah at his own
request.—

“Where is this love become in later age?
Alas! ’tis gone in endless pilgrimage
From hence, and never to return, I doubt,
Till revolution wheel those times about.”


One man says,—

“The world’s a popular disease, that reigns
Within the froward heart and frantic brains
Of poor distempered mortals.”


Another, that

    —“all the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.”


The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it. Old
Drayton thought that a man that lived here, and would be a poet, for
instance, should have in him certain “brave, translunary things,” and a
“fine madness” should possess his brain. Certainly it were as well,
that he might be up to the occasion. That is a superfluous wonder,
which Dr. Johnson expresses at the assertion of Sir Thomas Browne that
“his life has been a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not
history but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.” The
wonder is, rather, that all men do not assert as much. That would be a
rare praise, if it were true, which was addressed to Francis
Beaumont,—“Spectators sate part in your tragedies.”

Think what a mean and wretched place this world is; that half the time
we have to light a lamp that we may see to live in it. This is half our
life. Who would undertake the enterprise if it were all? And, pray,
what more has day to offer? A lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil,
say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less
obstruction. Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints,
we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.

I make ye an offer,
Ye gods, hear the scoffer,
The scheme will not hurt you,
If ye will find goodness, I will find virtue.
Though I am your creature,
And child of your nature,
I have pride still unbended,
And blood undescended,
Some free independence,
And my own descendants.
I cannot toil blindly,
Though ye behave kindly,
And I swear by the rood,
I’ll be slave to no God.
If ye will deal plainly,
I will strive mainly,
If ye will discover,
Great plans to your lover,
And give him a sphere
Somewhat larger than here.


“Verily, my angels! I was abashed on account of my servant, who had no
Providence but me; therefore did I pardon him.”—_The Gulistan of Sadi._

Most people with whom I talk, men and women even of some originality
and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dried,—very
_dry_, I assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and
powder-post, methinks,—which they set up between you and them in the
shortest intercourse; an ancient and tottering frame with all its
boards blown off. They do not walk without their bed. Some, to me,
seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations, are
for them everlastingly settled,—as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the
like. These are like the everlasting hills to them. But in all my
wanderings I never came across the least vestige of authority for these
things. They have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower
of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate. The wisest man
preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a
cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. If I ever see more
clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is
clearer. To see from earth to heaven, and see there standing, still a
fixture, that old Jewish scheme! What right have you to hold up this
obstacle to my understanding you, to your understanding me! You did not
invent it; it was imposed on you. Examine your authority. Even Christ,
we fear, had his scheme, his conformity to tradition, which slightly
vitiates his teaching. He had not swallowed all formulas. He preached
some mere doctrines. As for me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now only
the subtilest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning
sky. Your scheme must be the framework of the universe; all other
schemes will soon be ruins. The perfect God in his revelations of
himself has never got to the length of one such proposition as you, his
prophets, state. Have you learned the alphabet of heaven and can count
three? Do you know the number of God’s family? Can you put mysteries
into words? Do you presume to fable of the ineffable? Pray, what
geographer are you, that speak of heaven’s topography? Whose friend are
you that speak of God’s personality? Do you, Miles Howard, think that
he has made you his confidant? Tell me of the height of the mountains
of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of
the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad. Yet
we have a sort of family history of our God,—so have the Tahitians of
theirs,—and some old poet’s grand imagination is imposed on us as
adamantine everlasting truth, and God’s own word! Pythagoras says,
truly enough, “A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of
God”; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in
literature.

The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having
been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church
and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the
yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes.
It was hard to get the commentaries out of one’s head and taste its
true flavor.—I think that Pilgrim’s Progress is the best sermon which
has been preached from this text; almost all other sermons that I have
heard, or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this.—It would be
a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the
book has been edited by Christians. In fact, I love this book rarely,
though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which I am permitted to
dream. Having come to it so recently and freshly, it has the greater
charm, so that I cannot find any to talk with about it. I never read a
novel, they have so little real life and thought in them. The reading
which I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it
happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindoos, the
Chinese, and the Persians, than of the Hebrews, which I have come to
last. Give me one of these Bibles and you have silenced me for a while.
When I recover the use of my tongue, I am wont to worry my neighbors
with the new sentences; but commonly they cannot see that there is any
wit in them. Such has been my experience with the New Testament. I have
not yet got to the crucifixion, I have read it over so many times. I
should love dearly to read it aloud to my friends, some of whom are
seriously inclined; it is so good, and I am sure that they have never
heard it, it fits their case exactly, and we should enjoy it so much
together,—but I instinctively despair of getting their ears. They soon
show, by signs not to be mistaken, that it is inexpressibly wearisome
to them. I do not mean to imply that I am any better than my neighbors;
for, alas! I know that I am only as good, though I love better books
than they.

It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which
the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with
which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no
appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals. I know of no
book that has so few readers. There is none so truly strange, and
heretical, and unpopular. To Christians, no less than Greeks and Jews,
it is foolishness and a stumbling-block. There are, indeed, severe
things in it which no man should read aloud more than once.—“Seek first
the kingdom of heaven.”—“Lay not up for yourselves treasures on
earth.”—“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give
to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.”—“For what is a
man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”—Think of this,
Yankees!—“Verily, I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of
mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder
place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto
you.”—Think of repeating these things to a New England audience!
thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly, till there are three barrels of
sermons! Who, without cant, can read them aloud? Who, without cant, can
hear them, and not go out of the meeting-house? They never _were_ read,
they never _were_ heard. Let but one of these sentences be rightly
read, from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one
stone of that meeting-house upon another.

Yet the New Testament treats of man and man’s so-called spiritual
affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to
alone content me, who am not interested solely in man’s religious or
moral nature, or in man even. I have not the most definite designs on
the future. Absolutely speaking, Do unto others as you would that they
should do unto you, is by no means a golden rule, but the best of
current silver. An honest man would have but little occasion for it. It
is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case. The book has
never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance.
Christ was a sublime actor on the stage of the world. He knew what he
was thinking of when he said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my
words shall not pass away.” I draw near to him at such a time. Yet he
taught mankind but imperfectly how to live; his thoughts were all
directed toward another world. There is another kind of success than
his. Even here we have a sort of living to get, and must buffet it
somewhat longer. There are various tough problems yet to solve, and we
must make shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life
as we can.

A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents
a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for
Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some,
but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his
leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the
solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland
streams.

Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything,
because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them
in the end. The sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very
subtle policy, far finer than the politicians, and the world is very
successfully ruled by them as the policemen. It is not worth the while
to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does
not, and ought not to monopolize the whole of our lives, any more than
the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part. I
have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former
indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at
length gave them no peace. They did not know when to swallow their cud,
and their lives of course yielded no milk.

Conscience is instinct bred in the house,
Feeling and Thinking propagate the sin
By an unnatural breeding in and in.
I say, Turn it out doors,
Into the moors.
I love a life whose plot is simple,
And does not thicken with every pimple,
A soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it,
That makes the universe no worse than ’t finds it.
I love an earnest soul,
Whose mighty joy and sorrow
Are not drowned in a bowl,
And brought to life to-morrow;
That lives one tragedy,
And not seventy;
A conscience worth keeping,
Laughing not weeping;
A conscience wise and steady,
And forever ready;
Not changing with events,
Dealing in compliments;
A conscience exercised about
Large things, where one _may_ doubt.
I love a soul not all of wood,
Predestinated to be good,
But true to the backbone
Unto itself alone,
And false to none;
Born to its own affairs,
Its own joys and own cares;
By whom the work which God begun
Is finished, and not undone;
Taken up where he left off,
Whether to worship or to scoff;
If not good, why then evil,
If not good god, good devil.
Goodness!—you hypocrite, come out of that,
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
I have no patience towards
Such conscientious cowards.
Give me simple laboring folk,
Who love their work,
Whose virtue is a song
To cheer God along.


I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some
meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I
was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a
church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word
spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was “breaking the Lord’s
fourth commandment,” and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone,
the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary
work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to
trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did
not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The
country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a
village, the church, not only really but from association, is the
ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human
nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples
as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. There are few
things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the
streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher
shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning
the quiet atmosphere of the day. You fancy him to have taken off his
coat, as when men are about to do hot and dirty work.

If I should ask the minister of Middlesex to let me speak in his pulpit
on a Sunday, he would object, because I do not _pray_ as he does, or
because I am not _ordained_. What under the sun are these things?

Really, there is no infidelity, now-a-days, so great as that which
prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. The sealer of
the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine. The church is a sort of
hospital for men’s souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for
their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their
Retreat or Sailor’s Sung Harbor, where you may see a row of religious
cripples sitting outside in sunny weather. Let not the apprehension
that he may one day have to occupy a ward therein, discourage the
cheerful labors of the able-souled man. While he remembers the sick in
their extremities, let him not look thither as to his goal. One is sick
at heart of this pagoda worship. It is like the beating of gongs in a
Hindoo subterranean temple. In dark places and dungeons the preacher’s
words might perhaps strike root and grow, but not in broad daylight in
any part of the world that I know. The sound of the Sabbath bell far
away, now breaking on these shores, does not awaken pleasing
associations, but melancholy and sombre ones rather. One involuntarily
rests on his oar, to humor his unusually meditative mood. It is as the
sound of many catechisms and religious books twanging a canting peal
round the earth, seeming to issue from some Egyptian temple and echo
along the shore of the Nile, right opposite to Pharaoh’s palace and
Moses in the bulrushes, startling a multitude of storks and alligators
basking in the sun.

Everywhere “good men” sound a retreat, and the word has gone forth to
fall back on innocence. Fall forward rather on to whatever there is
there. Christianity only hopes. It has hung its harp on the willows,
and cannot sing a song in a strange land. It has dreamed a sad dream,
and does not yet welcome the morning with joy. The mother tells her
falsehoods to her child, but, thank Heaven, the child does not grow up
in its parent’s shadow. Our mother’s faith has not grown with her
experience. Her experience has been too much for her. The lesson of
life was too hard for her to learn.

It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be
incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the
personality of God. Some Earl of Bridgewater, thinking it better late
than never, has provided for it in his will. It is a sad mistake. In
reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author’s moral
reflections, and the words “Providence” and “He” scattered along the
page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. What he
calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. He
should know better than expose himself, and keep his foul sores covered
till they are quite healed. There is more religion in men’s science
than there is science in their religion. Let us make haste to the
report of the committee on swine.

A man’s real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an
article of his faith. The last is never adopted. This it is that
permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does. And
yet he clings anxiously to his creed, as to a straw, thinking that that
does him good service because his sheet anchor does not drag.

In most men’s religion, the ligature, which should be its umbilical
cord connecting them with divinity, is rather like that thread which
the accomplices of Cylon held in their hands when they went abroad from
the temple of Minerva, the other end being attached to the statue of
the goddess. But frequently, as in their case, the thread breaks, being
stretched, and they are left without an asylum.

“A good and pious man reclined his head on the bosom of contemplation,
and was absorbed in the ocean of a revery. At the instant when he
awaked from his vision, one of his friends, by way of pleasantry, said,
What rare gift have you brought us from that garden, where you have
been recreating? He replied, I fancied to myself and said, when I can
reach the rose-bower, I will fill my lap with the flowers, and bring
them as a present to my friends; but when I got there, the fragrance of
the roses so intoxicated me, that the skirt dropped from my hands.——‘O
bird of dawn! learn the warmth of affection from the moth; for that
scorched creature gave up the ghost, and uttered not a groan: These
vain pretenders are ignorant of him they seek after; for of him that
knew him we never heard again:—O thou! who towerest above the flights
of conjecture, opinion, and comprehension; whatever has been reported
of thee we have heard and read; the congregation is dismissed, and life
drawn to a close; and we still rest at our first encomium of
thee!’”—_Sadi_.

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 honest man look at you as if he had his
reputation to establish. 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 mastery 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 excursion. 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 Merrimack. 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 began again
busily to put in practice those old arts of rowing, steering, and
paddling. It seemed a strange phenomenon 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 of 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 catechizing 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 Eliot, with the Bible
and Catechism, and Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, 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 continues, “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
called Wannalancet, about two miles from the town, near Pawtuckett
falls, and bordering upon Merrimak river. This person, Wannalancet, is
the eldest son of old Pasaconaway, the chiefest sachem of Pawtuckett.
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 Gookin, “May 6, 1674,”—“after some
deliberation 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 custom to pass in a canoe upon the
river,) and now you exhort me to change and leave my old canoe, and
embark 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 “persons 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 persevere, for the end of his voyage
would be everlasting rest.”—“Since that time, I hear this sachem doth
persevere, and is a constant and diligent hearer of God’s word, and
sanctifieth the Sabbath, though he doth travel to Wamesit 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.”— _Gookin’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, Massaconomet, and Squaw
Sachem, did voluntarily submit themselves” to the English; and among
other things did “promise to be willing from time to time to be
instructed in the knowledge of God.” Being asked “Not to do any
unnecessary 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 assenting to all, they were solemnly received, and then
presented 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 afterward 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 mortars 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 Montaup 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 innumerable 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 confluence of the
Pemigewasset, which rises near the Notch of the White Mountains, and
the Winnipiseogee, 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 Mountains 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
unknown 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 reflected 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 untasted 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 recover its own dews into its bosom
again with interest at every eve.

It was already the water of Squam and Newfound Lake and Winnipiseogee,
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
incalculable 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
steamboat, and it was a pleasant sight to watch from its deck the
fishermen 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 Haverhill, 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.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As
naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a
poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable
success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. What
else have the Hindoos, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians
done, that can be told? It is the simplest relation of phenomena, and
describes the commonest sensations with more truth than science does,
and the latter at a distance slowly mimics its style and methods. The
poet sings how the blood flows in his veins. He performs his functions,
and is so well that he needs such stimulus to sing only as plants to
put forth leaves and blossoms. He would strive in vain to modulate the
remote and transient music which he sometimes hears, since his song is
a vital function like breathing, and an integral result like weight. It
is not the overflowing of life but its subsidence rather, and is drawn
from under the feet of the poet. It is enough if Homer but say the sun
sets. He is as serene as nature, and we can hardly detect the
enthusiasm of the bard. It is as if nature spoke. He presents to us the
simplest pictures of human life, so the child itself can understand
them, and the man must not think twice to appreciate his naturalness.
Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler
features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy
his similes. His more memorable passages are as naturally bright as
gleams of sunshine in misty weather. Nature furnishes him not only with
words, but with stereotyped lines and sentences from her mint.

“As from the clouds appears the full moon,
All shining, and then again it goes behind the shadowy clouds,
So Hector, at one time appeared among the foremost,
And at another in the rear, commanding; and all with brass
He shone, like to the lightning of ægis-bearing Zeus.”


He conveys the least information, even the hour of the day, with such
magnificence and vast expense of natural imagery, as if it were a
message from the gods.

“While it was dawn, and sacred day was advancing,
For that space the weapons of both flew fast, and the people fell;
But when now the woodcutter was preparing his morning meal,
In the recesses of the mountain, and had wearied his hands
With cutting lofty trees, and satiety came to his mind,
And the desire of sweet food took possession of his thoughts;
Then the Danaans, by their valor, broke the phalanxes,
Shouting to their companions from rank to rank.”


When the army of the Trojans passed the night under arms, keeping watch
lest the enemy should re-embark under cover of the dark,

“They, thinking great things, upon the neutral ground of war
Sat all the night; and many fires burned for them.
As when in the heavens the stars round the bright moon
Appear beautiful, and the air is without wind;
And all the heights, and the extreme summits,
And the wooded sides of the mountains appear; and from the heavens an
infinite ether is diffused,
And all the stars are seen, and the shepherd rejoices in his heart;
So between the ships and the streams of Xanthus
Appeared the fires of the Trojans before Ilium.
A thousand fires burned on the plain, and by each
Sat fifty, in the light of the blazing fire;
And horses eating white barley and corn,
Standing by the chariots, awaited fair-throned Aurora.”


The “white-armed goddess Juno,” sent by the Father of gods and men for
Iris and Apollo,

“Went down the Idæan mountains to far Olympus,
As when the mind of a man, who has come over much earth,
Sallies forth, and he reflects with rapid thoughts,
There was I, and there, and remembers many things;
So swiftly the august Juno hastening flew through the air,
And came to high Olympus.”


His scenery is always true, and not invented. He does not leap in
imagination from Asia to Greece, through mid air,

ἐπειὴ μάλα πολλὰ μεταξύ
Ὄυρεά τε σκιοέντα, θαλάσσα τε ἠχήεσσα.
for there are very many
Shady mountains and resounding seas between.


If his messengers repair but to the tent of Achilles, we do not wonder
how they got there, but accompany them step by step along the shore of
the resounding sea. Nestor’s account of the march of the Pylians
against the Epeians is extremely lifelike:—

“Then rose up to them sweet-worded Nestor, the shrill orator of the
Pylians,
And words sweeter than honey flowed from his tongue.”


This time, however, he addresses Patroclus alone: “A certain river,
Minyas by name, leaps seaward near to Arene, where we Pylians wait the
dawn, both horse and foot. Thence with all haste we sped us on the
morrow ere ’t was noonday, accoutred for the fight, even to Alpheus’s
sacred source,” &c. We fancy that we hear the subdued murmuring of the
Minyas discharging its waters into the main the livelong night, and the
hollow sound of the waves breaking on the shore,—until at length we are
cheered at the close of a toilsome march by the gurgling fountains of
Alpheus.

There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest hours,
but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and embodies still all
the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours
can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east
of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the
mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust,
foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death
of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down
to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of
Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in
his rising.

“Homer is gone; and where is Jove? and where
The rival cities seven? His song outlives
Time, tower, and god,—all that then was, save Heaven.”


So too, no doubt, Homer had his Homer, and Orpheus his Orpheus, in the
dim antiquity which preceded them. The mythological system of the
ancients, and it is still the mythology of the moderns, the poem of
mankind, interwoven so wonderfully with their astronomy, and matching
in grandeur and harmony the architecture of the heavens themselves,
seems to point to a time when a mightier genius inhabited the earth.
But, after all, man is the great poet, and not Homer nor Shakespeare;
and our language itself, and the common arts of life, are his work.
Poetry is so universally true and independent of experience, that it
does not need any particular biography to illustrate it, but we refer
it sooner or later to some Orpheus or Linus, and after ages to the
genius of humanity and the gods themselves.

It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the
society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor
fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems,
and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead
of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (τελεία) thoughts to
the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at
least once a day. The whole of the day should not be daytime; there
should be one hour, if no more, which the day did not bring forth.
Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning. But
is it necessary to know what the speculator prints, or the thoughtless
study, or the idle read, the literature of the Russians and the
Chinese, or even French philosophy and much of German criticism. Read
the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
“There are the worshippers with offerings, and the worshippers with
mortifications; and again the worshippers with enthusiastic devotion;
so there are those the wisdom of whose reading is their worship, men of
subdued passions and severe manners;—This world is not for him who doth
not worship; and where, O Arjoon, is there another?” Certainly, we do
not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who
resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than
if he took a nap. The front aspect of great thoughts can only be
enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive. Books, not
which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of
unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would
not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing
institutions,—such call I good books.

All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily
belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries
and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a
thousand disguises. “The way to trade,” as a pedler once told me, “is
to _put it right through_,” no matter what it is, anything that is
agreed on.

“You grov’ling worldlings, you whose wisdom trades
Where light ne’er shot his golden ray.”


By dint of able writing and pen-craft, books are cunningly compiled,
and have their run and success even among the learned, as if they were
the result of a new man’s thinking, and their birth were attended with
some natural throes. But in a little while their covers fall off, for
no binding will avail, and it appears that they are not Books or Bibles
at all. There are new and patented inventions in this shape, purporting
to be for the elevation of the race, which many a pure scholar and
genius who has learned to read is for a moment deceived by, and finds
himself reading a horse-rake, or spinning-jenny, or wooden nutmeg, or
oak-leaf cigar, or steam-power press, or kitchen range, perchance, when
he was seeking serene and biblical truths.

        “Merchants, arise,
And mingle conscience with your merchandise.”


Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they
write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat and potatoes,
they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters.
Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise
crops of grain to be distilled into brandy. Books are for the most part
wilfully and hastily written, as parts of a system, to supply a want
real or imagined. Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty
schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not
in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or
rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct
the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors
always dwell.

“To Athens gowned he goes, and from that school
Returns unsped, a more instructed fool.”


They teach the elements really of ignorance, not of knowledge, for, to
speak deliberately and in view of the highest truths, it is not easy to
distinguish elementary knowledge. There is a chasm between knowledge
and ignorance which the arches of science can never span. A book should
contain pure discoveries, glimpses of _terra firma_, though by
shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have
never been out of sight of land. _They_ must not yield wheat and
potatoes, but must themselves be the unconstrained and natural harvest
of their author’s lives.

“What I have learned is mine; I’ve had my thought,
And me the Muses noble truths have taught.”


We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human
books, from frank and honest biographies. The life of a good man will
hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the
inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the
observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of
virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands
sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and
performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the
alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.

At least let us have healthy books, a stout horse-rake or a kitchen
range which is not cracked. Let not the poet shed tears only for the
public weal. He should be as vigorous as a sugar-maple, with sap enough
to maintain his own verdure, beside what runs into the troughs, and not
like a vine, which being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds
to death in the endeavor to heal its wounds. The poet is he that hath
fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He
hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow. We love to think
in winter, as we walk over the snowy pastures, of those happy dreamers
that lie under the sod, of dormice and all that race of dormant
creatures, which have such a superfluity of life enveloped in thick
folds of fur, impervious to cold. Alas, the poet too is, in one sense,
a sort of dormouse gone into winter quarters of deep and serene
thoughts, insensible to surrounding circumstances; his words are the
relation of his oldest and finest memory, a wisdom drawn from the
remotest experience. Other men lead a starved existence, meanwhile,
like hawks, that would fain keep on the wing, and trust to pick up a
sparrow now and then.

There are already essays and poems, the growth of this land, which are
not in vain, all which, however, we could conveniently have stowed in
the till of our chest. If the gods permitted their own inspiration to
be breathed in vain, these might be overlooked in the crowd, but the
accents of truth are as sure to be heard at last on earth as in heaven.
They already seem ancient, and in some measure have lost the traces of
their modern birth. Here are they who

—“ask for that which is our whole life’s light,
For the perpetual, true and clear insight.”


I remember a few sentences which spring like the sward in its native
pasture, where its roots were never disturbed, and not as if spread
over a sandy embankment; answering to the poet’s prayer,

    “Let us set so just
A rate on knowledge, that the world may trust
The poet’s sentence, and not still aver
Each art is to itself a flatterer.”


But, above all, in our native port, did we not frequent the peaceful
games of the Lyceum, from which a new era will be dated to New England,
as from the games of Greece. For if Herodotus carried his history to
Olympia to read, after the cestus and the race, have we not heard such
histories recited there, which since our countrymen have read, as made
Greece sometimes to be forgotten?—Philosophy, too, has there her grove
and portico, not wholly unfrequented in these days.

Lately the victor, whom all Pindars praised, has won another palm,
contending with

“Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.”


What earth or sea, mountain or stream, or Muses’ spring or grove, is
safe from his all-searching ardent eye, who drives off Phœbus’ beaten
track, visits unwonted zones, makes the gelid Hyperboreans glow, and
the old polar serpent writhe, and many a Nile flow back and hide his
head!

That Phaeton of our day,
Who’d make another milky way,
And burn the world up with his ray;

By us an undisputed seer,—
Who’d drive his flaming car so near
Unto our shuddering mortal sphere,

Disgracing all our slender worth,
And scorching up the living earth,
To prove his heavenly birth.

The silver spokes, the golden tire,
Are glowing with unwonted fire,
And ever nigher roll and nigher;

The pins and axle melted are,
The silver radii fly afar,
Ah, he will spoil his Father’s car!

Who let him have the steeds he cannot steer?
Henceforth the sun will not shine for a year;
And we shall Ethiops all appear.


From _his_

“lips of cunning fell
    The thrilling Delphic oracle.”


And yet, sometimes,

We should not mind if on our ear there fell
Some less of cunning, more of oracle.


It is Apollo shining in your face. O rare Contemporary, let us have
far-off heats. Give us the subtler, the heavenlier though fleeting
beauty, which passes through and through, and dwells not in the verse;
even pure water, which but reflects those tints which wine wears in its
grain. Let epic trade-winds blow, and cease this waltz of inspirations.
Let us oftener feel even the gentle southwest wind upon our cheeks
blowing from the Indian’s heaven. What though we lose a thousand
meteors from the sky, if skyey depths, if star-dust and undissolvable
nebulæ remain? What though we lose a thousand wise responses of the
oracle, if we may have instead some natural acres of Ionian earth?

Though we know well,

“That’t is not in the power of kings [or presidents] to raise
A spirit for verse that is not born thereto,
Nor are they born in every prince’s days”;


yet spite of all they sang in praise of their “Eliza’s reign,” we have
evidence that poets may be born and sing in _our_ day, in the
presidency of James K. Polk,

“And that the utmost powers of English rhyme,”
_Were not_ “within _her_ peaceful reign confined.”


The prophecy of the poet Daniel is already how much more than
fulfilled!

“And who in time knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue? To what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent,
T’ enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
What worlds in th’ yet unformed occident,
May come refined with the accents that are ours.”


Enough has been said in these days of the charm of fluent writing. We
hear it complained of some works of genius, that they have fine
thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow. But even the mountain
peaks in the horizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one range. We
should consider that the flow of thought is more like a tidal wave than
a prone river, and is the result of a celestial influence, not of any
declivity in its channel. The river flows because it runs down hill,
and flows the faster the faster it descends. The reader who expects to
float down stream for the whole voyage, may well complain of nauseating
swells and choppings of the sea when his frail shore-craft gets amidst
the billows of the ocean stream, which flows as much to sun and moon as
lesser streams to it. But if we would appreciate the flow that is in
these books, we must expect to feel it rise from the page like an
exhalation, and wash away our critical brains like burr millstones,
flowing to higher levels above and behind ourselves. There is many a
book which ripples on like a freshet, and flows as glibly as a
mill-stream sucking under a causeway; and when their authors are in the
full tide of their discourse, Pythagoras and Plato and Jamblichus halt
beside them. Their long, stringy, slimy sentences are of that
consistency that they naturally flow and run together. They read as if
written for military men, for men of business, there is such a despatch
in them. Compared with these, the grave thinkers and philosophers seem
not to have got their swaddling-clothes off; they are slower than a
Roman army in its march, the rear camping to-night where the van camped
last night. The wise Jamblichus eddies and gleams like a watery slough.

“How many thousands never heard the name
    Of Sidney, or of Spenser, or their books?
And yet brave fellows, and presume of fame,
    And seem to bear down all the world with looks.”


The ready writer seizes the pen, and shouts, Forward! Alamo and
Fanning! and after rolls the tide of war. The very walls and fences
seem to travel. But the most rapid trot is no flow after all; and
thither, reader, you and I, at least, will not follow.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the
most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could
be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their
colors, or the heavens without their azure. The most attractive
sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest.
They are spoken firmly and conclusively, as if the speaker had a right
to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well
learned. Sir Walter Raleigh might well be studied if only for the
excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the midst of so many
masters. There is a natural emphasis in his style, like a man’s tread,
and a breathing space between the sentences, which the best of modern
writing does not furnish. His chapters are like English parks, or say
rather like a Western forest, where the larger growth keeps down the
underwood, and one may ride on horseback through the openings. All the
distinguished writers of that period possess a greater vigor and
naturalness than the more modern,—for it is allowed to slander our own
time,—and when we read a quotation from one of them in the midst of a
modern author, we seem to have come suddenly upon a greener ground, a
greater depth and strength of soil. It is as if a green bough were laid
across the page, and we are refreshed as by the sight of fresh grass in
midwinter or early spring. You have constantly the warrant of life and
experience in what you read. The little that is said is eked out by
implication of the much that was done. The sentences are verdurous and
blooming as evergreen and flowers, because they are rooted in fact and
experience, but our false and florid sentence have only the tints of
flowers without their sap or roots. All men are really most attracted
by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write in a florid style in
imitation of this. They prefer to be misunderstood rather than to come
short of its exuberance. Hussein Effendi praised the epistolary style
of Ibrahim Pasha to the French traveller Botta, because of “the
difficulty of understanding it; there was,” he said, “but one person at
Jidda, who was capable of understanding and explaining the Pasha’s
correspondence.” A man’s whole life is taxed for the least thing well
done. It is its net result. Every sentence is the result of a long
probation. Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words
of a standard man? The word which is best said came nearest to not
being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could
have better done. Nay, almost it must have taken the place of a deed by
some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest
writer will be some captive knight, after all. And perhaps the fates
had such a design, when, having stored Raleigh so richly with the
substance of life and experience, they made him a fast prisoner, and
compelled him to make his words his deeds, and transfer to his
expression the emphasis and sincerity of his action.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of
proportion to the use they commonly serve. We are amused to read how
Ben Jonson engaged, that the dull masks with which the royal family and
nobility were to be entertained should be “grounded upon antiquity and
solid learning.” Can there be any greater reproach than an idle
learning? Learn to split wood, at least. The necessity of labor and
conversation with many men and things, to the scholar is rarely well
remembered; steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention
also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and
sentimentality out of one’s style, both of speaking and writing. If he
has worked hard from morning till night, though he may have grieved
that he could not be watching the train of his thoughts during that
time, yet the few hasty lines which at evening record his day’s
experience will be more musical and true than his freest but idle fancy
could have furnished. Surely the writer is to address a world of
laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline. He will not
idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before nightfall in
the short days of winter; but every stroke will be husbanded, and ring
soberly through the wood; and so will the strokes of that scholar’s
pen, which at evening record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet
cheerily, on the ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe
have died away. The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher
truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the
sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort,
without a corresponding energy of the body. We are often struck by the
force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpractised in
writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if
plainness, and vigor, and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were
better learned on the farm and in the workshop, than in the schools.
The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like
hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine. As
for the graces of expression, a great thought is never found in a mean
dress; but though it proceed from the lips of the Woloffs, the nine
Muses and the three Graces will have conspired to clothe it in fit
phrase. Its education has always been liberal, and its implied wit can
endow a college. The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been
made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not
fitted to endure. The Sibyl, “speaking with inspired mouth, smileless,
inornate, and unperfumed, pierces through centuries by the power of the
god.” The scholar might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis
of the farmer’s call to his team, and confess that if that were written
it would surpass his labored sentences. Whose are the truly _labored_
sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and
literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the
simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore
our tone and spirits. A sentence should read as if its author, had he
held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and
straight to the end. The scholar requires hard and serious labor to
give an impetus to his thought. He will learn to grasp the pen firmly
so, and wield it gracefully and effectively, as an axe or a sword. When
we consider the weak and nerveless periods of some literary men, who
perchance in feet and inches come up to the standard of their race, and
are not deficient in girth also, we are amazed at the immense sacrifice
of thews and sinews. What! these proportions,—these bones,—and this
their work! Hands which could have felled an ox have hewed this fragile
matter which would not have tasked a lady’s fingers! Can this be a
stalwart man’s work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon Achilles
in his heel? They who set up the blocks of Stonehenge did somewhat, if
they only laid out their strength for once, and stretched themselves.

Yet, after all, the truly efficient laborer will not crowd his day with
work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease
and leisure, and then do but what he loves best. He is anxious only
about the fruitful kernels of time. Though the hen should sit all day,
she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up
materials for another. Let a man take time enough for the most trivial
deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell
imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as if the short spring days
were an eternity.

Then spend an age in whetting thy desire,
Thou needs’t not _hasten_ if thou dost _stand fast_.


Some hours seem not to be occasion for any deed, but for resolves to
draw breath in. We do not directly go about the execution of the
purpose that thrills us, but shut our doors behind us and ramble with
prepared mind, as if the half were already done. Our resolution is
taking root or hold on the earth then, as seeds first send a shoot
downward which is fed by their own albumen, ere they send one upward to
the light.

There is a sort of homely truth and naturalness in some books which is
very rare to find, and yet looks cheap enough. There may be nothing
lofty in the sentiment, or fine in the expression, but it is careless
country talk. Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a
house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a
very high art. Some have this merit only. The scholar is not apt to
make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his
expression. Very few men can speak of Nature, for instance, with any
truth. They overstep her modesty, somehow or other, and confer no
favor. They do not speak a good word for her. Most cry better than they
speak, and you can get more nature out of them by pinching than by
addressing them. The surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his
woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is better than the
mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature. Better that the
primrose by the river’s brim be a yellow primrose, and nothing more,
than that it be something less. Aubrey relates of Thomas Fuller that
his was “a very working head, insomuch that, walking and meditating
before dinner, he would eat up a penny loaf, not knowing that he did
it. His natural memory was very great, to which he added the art of
memory. He would repeat to you forwards and backwards all the signs
from Ludgate to Charing Cross.” He says of Mr. John Hales, that, “He
loved Canarie,” and was buried “under an altar monument of black
marble—— with a too long epitaph”; of Edmund Halley, that he “at
sixteen could make a dial, and then, he said, he thought himself a
brave fellow”; of William Holder, who wrote a book upon his curing one
Popham who was deaf and dumb, “he was beholding to no author; did only
consult with nature.” For the most part, an author consults only with
all who have written before him upon a subject, and his book is but the
advice of so many. But a good book will never have been forestalled,
but the topic itself will in one sense be new, and its author, by
consulting with nature, will consult not only with those who have gone
before, but with those who may come after. There is always room and
occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for
more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the
first.

We thus worked our way up this river, gradually adjusting our thoughts
to novelties, beholding from its placid bosom a new nature and new
works of men, and, as it were with increasing confidence, finding
nature still habitable, genial, and propitious to us; not following any
beaten path, but the windings of the river, as ever the nearest way for
us. Fortunately we had no business in this country. The Concord had
rarely been a river, or _rivus_, but barely _fluvius_, or between
_fluvius_ and _lacus_. This Merrimack was neither _rivus_ nor _fluvius_
nor _lacus_, but rather _amnis_ here, a gently swelling and stately
rolling flood approaching the sea. We could even sympathize with its
buoyant tide, going to seek its fortune in the ocean, and, anticipating
the time when “being received within the plain of its freer water,” it
should “beat the shores for banks,”—

        “campoque recepta
Liberioris aquæ, pro ripis litora pulsant.”


At length we doubled a low shrubby islet, called Rabbit Island,
subjected alternately to the sun and to the waves, as desolate as if it
lay some leagues within the icy sea, and found ourselves in a narrower
part of the river, near the sheds and yards for picking the stone known
as the Chelmsford granite, which is quarried in Westford and the
neighboring towns. We passed Wicasuck Island, which contains seventy
acres or more, on our right, between Chelmsford and Tyngsborough. This
was a favorite residence of the Indians. According to the History of
Dunstable, “About 1663, the eldest son of Passaconaway [Chief of the
Penacooks] was thrown into jail for a debt of £45, due to John Tinker,
by one of his tribe, and which he had promised verbally should be paid.
To relieve him from his imprisonment, his brother Wannalancet and
others, who owned Wicasuck Island, sold it and paid the debt.” It was,
however, restored to the Indians by the General Court in 1665. After
the departure of the Indians in 1683, it was granted to Jonathan Tyng
in payment for his services to the colony, in maintaining a garrison at
his house. Tyng’s house stood not far from Wicasuck Falls. Gookin, who,
in his Epistle Dedicatory to Robert Boyle, apologizes for presenting
his “matter clothed in a wilderness dress,” says that on the breaking
out of Philip’s war in 1675, there were taken up by the Christian
Indians and the English in Marlborough, and sent to Cambridge, seven
“Indians belonging to Narragansett, Long Island, and Pequod, who had
all been at work about seven weeks with one Mr. Jonathan Tyng, of
Dunstable, upon Merrimack River; and, hearing of the war, they reckoned
with their master, and getting their wages, conveyed themselves away
without his privity, and, being afraid, marched secretly through the
woods, designing to go to their own country.” However, they were
released soon after. Such were the hired men in those days. Tyng was
the first permanent settler of Dunstable, which then embraced what is
now Tyngsborough and many other towns. In the winter of 1675, in
Philip’s war, every other settler left the town, but “he,” says the
historian of Dunstable, “fortified his house; and, although ‘obliged to
send to Boston for his food,’ sat himself down in the midst of his
savage enemies, alone, in the wilderness, to defend his home. Deeming
his position an important one for the defence of the frontiers, in
February, 1676, he petitioned the Colony for aid,” humbly showing, as
his petition runs, that, as he lived “in the uppermost house on
Merrimac river, lying open to ye enemy, yet being so seated that it is,
as it were, a watch-house to the neighboring towns,” he could render
important service to his country if only he had some assistance, “there
being,” he said, “never an inhabitant left in the town but myself.”
Wherefore he requests that their “Honors would be pleased to order him
_three or four men_ to help garrison his said house,” which they did.
But methinks that such a garrison would be weakened by the addition of
a man.

“Make bandog thy scout watch to bark at a thief,
Make courage for life, to be capitain chief;
Make trap-door thy bulwark, make bell to begin,
Make gunstone and arrow show who is within.”


Thus he earned the title of first permanent settler. In 1694 a law was
passed “that every settler who deserted a town for fear of the Indians
should forfeit all his rights therein.” But now, at any rate, as I have
frequently observed, a man may desert the fertile frontier territories
of truth and justice, which are the State’s best lands, for fear of far
more insignificant foes, without forfeiting any of his civil rights
therein. Nay, townships are granted to deserters, and the General
Court, as I am sometimes inclined to regard it, is but a deserters’
camp itself.

As we rowed along near the shore of Wicasuck Island, which was then
covered with wood, in order to avoid the current, two men, who looked
as if they had just run out of Lowell, where they had been waylaid by
the Sabbath, meaning to go to Nashua, and who now found themselves in
the strange, natural, uncultivated, and unsettled part of the globe
which intervenes, full of walls and barriers, a rough and uncivil place
to them, seeing our boat moving so smoothly up the stream, called out
from the high bank above our heads to know if we would take them as
passengers, as if this were the street they had missed; that they might
sit and chat and drive away the time, and so at last find themselves in
Nashua. This smooth way they much preferred. But our boat was crowded
with necessary furniture, and sunk low in the water, and moreover
required to be worked, for even _it_ did not progress against the
stream without effort; so we were obliged to deny them passage. As we
glided away with even sweeps, while the fates scattered oil in our
course, the sun now sinking behind the alders on the distant shore, we
could still see them far off over the water, running along the shore
and climbing over the rocks and fallen trees like insects,—for they did
not know any better than we that they were on an island,—the
unsympathizing river ever flowing in an opposite direction; until,
having reached the entrance of the island brook, which they had
probably crossed upon the locks below, they found a more effectual
barrier to their progress. They seemed to be learning much in a little
time. They ran about like ants on a burning brand, and once more they
tried the river here, and once more there, to see if water still indeed
was not to be walked on, as if a new thought inspired them, and by some
peculiar disposition of the limbs they could accomplish it. At length
sober common sense seemed to have resumed its sway, and they concluded
that what they had so long heard must be true, and resolved to ford the
shallower stream. When nearly a mile distant we could see them
stripping off their clothes and preparing for this experiment; yet it
seemed likely that a new dilemma would arise, they were so
thoughtlessly throwing away their clothes on the wrong side of the
stream, as in the case of the countryman with his corn, his fox, and
his goose, which had to be transported one at a time. Whether they got
safely through, or went round by the locks, we never learned. We could
not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent indifference of
Nature to these men’s necessities, while elsewhere she was equally
serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is
unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of
his Lowell, put to pilgrim’s shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip
and scallop shell.

We, too, who held the middle of the stream, came near experiencing a
pilgrim’s fate, being tempted to pursue what seemed a sturgeon or
larger fish, for we remembered that this was the Sturgeon River, its
dark and monstrous back alternately rising and sinking in mid-stream.
We kept falling behind, but the fish kept his back well out, and did
not dive, and seemed to prefer to swim against the stream, so, at any
rate, he would not escape us by going out to sea. At length, having got
as near as was convenient, and looking out not to get a blow from his
tail, now the bow-gunner delivered his charge, while the stern-man held
his ground. But the halibut-skinned monster, in one of these
swift-gliding pregnant moments, without ever ceasing his bobbing up and
down, saw fit, without a chuckle or other prelude, to proclaim himself
a huge imprisoned spar, placed there as a buoy, to warn sailors of
sunken rocks. So, each casting some blame upon the other, we withdrew
quickly to safer waters.

The Scene-shifter saw fit here to close the drama, of this day, without
regard to any unities which we mortals prize. Whether it might have
proved tragedy, or comedy, or tragi-comedy, or pastoral, we cannot
tell. This Sunday ended by the going down of the sun, leaving us still
on the waves. But they who are on the water enjoy a longer and brighter
twilight than they who are on the land, for here the water, as well as
the atmosphere, absorbs and reflects the light, and some of the day
seems to have sunk down into the waves. The light gradually forsook the
deep water, as well as the deeper air, and the gloaming came to the
fishes as well as to us, and more dim and gloomy to them, whose day is
a perpetual twilight, though sufficiently bright for their weak and
watery eyes. Vespers had already rung in many a dim and watery chapel
down below, where the shadows of the weeds were extended in length over
the sandy floor. The vespertinal pout had already begun to flit on
leathern fin, and the finny gossips withdrew from the fluvial street to
creeks and coves, and other private haunts, excepting a few of stronger
fin, which anchored in the stream, stemming the tide even in their
dreams. Meanwhile, like a dark evening cloud, we were wafted over the
cope of their sky, deepening the shadows on their deluged fields.

Having reached a retired part of the river where it spread out to sixty
rods in width, we pitched our tent on the east side, in Tyngsborough,
just above some patches of the beach plum, which was now nearly ripe,
where the sloping bank was a sufficient pillow, and with the bustle of
sailors making the land, we transferred such stores as were required
from boat to tent, and hung a lantern to the tent-pole, and so our
house was ready. With a buffalo spread on the grass, and a blanket for
our covering our bed was soon made. A fire crackled merrily before the
entrance, so near that we could tend it without stepping abroad, and
when we had supped, we put out the blaze, and closed the door, and with
the semblance of domestic comfort, sat up to read the Gazetteer, to
learn our latitude and longitude, and write the journal of the voyage,
or listened to the wind and the rippling of the river till sleep
overtook us. There we lay under an oak on the bank of the stream, near
to some farmer’s cornfield, getting sleep, and forgetting where we
were; a great blessing, that we are obliged to forget our enterprises
every twelve hours. Minks, muskrats, meadow-mice, woodchucks,
squirrels, skunks, rabbits, foxes, and weasels, all inhabit near, but
keep very close while you are there. The river sucking and eddying away
all night down toward the marts and the seaboard, a great wash and
freshet, and no small enterprise to reflect on. Instead of the Scythian
vastness of the Billerica night, and its wild musical sounds, we were
kept awake by the boisterous sport of some Irish laborers on the
railroad, wafted to us over the water, still unwearied and unresting on
this seventh day, who would not have done with whirling up and down the
track with ever increasing velocity and still reviving shouts, till
late in the night.

One sailor was visited in his dreams this night by the Evil Destinies,
and all those powers that are hostile to human life, which constrain
and oppress the minds of men, and make their path seem difficult and
narrow, and beset with dangers, so that the most innocent and worthy
enterprises appear insolent and a tempting of fate, and the gods go not
with us. But the other happily passed a serene and even ambrosial or
immortal night, and his sleep was dreamless, or only the atmosphere of
pleasant dreams remained, a happy natural sleep until the morning; and
his cheerful spirit soothed and reassured his brother, for whenever
they meet, the Good Genius is sure to prevail.




MONDAY


“I thynke for to touche also
The worlde whiche neweth everie daie,
So as I can, so as I maie.”

GOWER.


“The hye sheryfe of Notynghame,
    Hym holde in your mynd.”

_Robin Hood Ballads_.


“His shoote it was but loosely shott,
    Yet flewe not the arrowe in vaine,
For it mett one of the sheriffe’s men,
    And William a Trent was slaine.”

_Robin Hood Ballads_


“Gazed on the heavens for what he missed on Earth.”

_Britania’s Pastorals_


When the first light dawned on the earth and the birds, awoke, and the
brave river was heard rippling confidently seaward, and the nimble
early rising wind rustled the oak leaves about our tent, all men having
reinforced their bodies and their souls with sleep, and cast aside
doubt and fear, were invited to unattempted adventures.

“All courageous knichtis
Agains the day dichtis
The breest-plate that bricht is,
        To feght with their foue.
The stoned steed stampis
Throw curage and crampis,
Syne on the land lampis;
        The night is neir gone.”


One of us took the boat over to the opposite shore, which was flat and
accessible, a quarter of a mile distant, to empty it of water and wash
out the clay, while the other kindled a fire and got breakfast ready.
At an early hour we were again on our way, rowing through the fog as
before, the river already awake, and a million crisped waves come forth
to meet the sun when he should show himself. The countrymen, recruited
by their day of rest, were already stirring, and had begun to cross the
ferry on the business of the week. This ferry was as busy as a beaver
dam, and all the world seemed anxious to get across the Merrimack River
at this particular point, waiting to get set over,—children with their
two cents done up in paper, jail-birds broke loose and constable with
warrant, travellers from distant lands to distant lands, men and women
to whom the Merrimack River was a bar. There stands a gig in the gray
morning, in the mist, the impatient traveller pacing the wet shore with
whip in hand, and shouting through the fog after the regardless Charon
and his retreating ark, as if he might throw that passenger overboard
and return forthwith for himself; he will compensate him. He is to
break his fast at some unseen place on the opposite side. It may be
Ledyard or the Wandering Jew. Whence, pray, did he come out of the
foggy night? and whither through the sunny day will he go? We observe
only his transit; important to us, forgotten by him, transiting all
day. There are two of them. May be, they are Virgil and Dante. But when
they crossed the Styx, none were seen bound up or down the stream, that
I remember. It is only a _transjectus_, a transitory voyage, like life
itself, none but the long-lived gods bound up or down the stream. Many
of these Monday men are ministers, no doubt, reseeking their parishes
with hired horses, with sermons in their valises all read and gutted,
the day after never with them. They cross each other’s routes all the
country over like woof and warp, making a garment of loose texture;
vacation now for six days. They stop to pick nuts and berries, and
gather apples by the wayside at their leisure. Good religious men, with
the love of men in their hearts, and the means to pay their toll in
their pockets. We got over this ferry chain without scraping, rowing
athwart the tide of travel,—no toll for us that day.

The fog dispersed and we rowed leisurely along through Tyngsborough,
with a clear sky and a mild atmosphere, leaving the habitations of men
behind and penetrating yet farther into the territory of ancient
Dunstable. It was from Dunstable, then a frontier town, that the famous
Captain Lovewell, with his company, marched in quest of the Indians on
the 18th of April, 1725. He was the son of “an ensign in the army of
Oliver Cromwell, who came to this country, and settled at Dunstable,
where he died at the great age of one hundred and twenty years.” In the
words of the old nursery tale, sung about a hundred years ago,—

“He and his valiant soldiers did range the woods full wide,
And hardships they endured to quell the Indian’s pride.”


In the shaggy pine forest of Pequawket they met the “rebel Indians,”
and prevailed, after a bloody fight, and a remnant returned home to
enjoy the fame of their victory. A township called Lovewell’s Town, but
now, for some reason, or perhaps without reason, Pembroke, was granted
them by the State.

“Of all our valiant English, there were but thirty-four,
And of the rebel Indians, there were about four-score;
And sixteen of our English did safely home return,
The rest were killed and wounded, for which we all must mourn.

“Our worthy Capt. Lovewell among them there did die,
They killed Lieut. Robbins, and wounded good young Frye,
Who was our English Chaplin; he many Indians slew,
And some of them he scalped while bullets round him flew.”


Our brave forefathers have exterminated all the Indians, and their
degenerate children no longer dwell in garrisoned houses nor hear any
war-whoop in their path. It would be well, perchance, if many an
“English Chaplin” in these days could exhibit as unquestionable
trophies of his valor as did “good young Frye.” We have need to be as
sturdy pioneers still as Miles Standish, or Church, or Lovewell. We are
to follow on another trail, it is true, but one as convenient for
ambushes. What if the Indians are exterminated, are not savages as grim
prowling about the clearings to-day?—

“And braving many dangers and hardships in the way,
They safe arrived at Dunstable the thirteenth (?) day of May.”


But they did not all “safe arrive in Dunstable the thirteenth,” or the
fifteenth, or the thirtieth “day of May.” Eleazer Davis and Josiah
Jones, both of Concord, for our native town had seven men in this
fight, Lieutenant Farwell, of Dunstable, and Jonathan Frye, of Andover,
who were all wounded, were left behind, creeping toward the
settlements. “After travelling several miles, Frye was left and lost,”
though a more recent poet has assigned him company in his last hours.

“A man he was of comely form,
    Polished and brave, well learned and kind;
Old Harvard’s learned halls he left
    Far in the wilds a grave to find.

“Ah! now his blood-red arm he lifts;
    His closing lids he tries to raise;
And speak once more before he dies,
    In supplication and in praise.

“He prays kind Heaven to grant success,
    Brave Lovewell’s men to guide and bless,
And when they’ve shed their heart-blood true,
    To raise them all to happiness.” . . .

“Lieutenant Farwell took his hand,
    His arm around his neck he threw,
And said, ‘Brave Chaplain, I could wish
    That Heaven had made me die for you.’”


Farwell held out eleven days. “A tradition says,” as we learn from the
History of Concord, “that arriving at a pond with Lieut. Farwell, Davis
pulled off one of his moccasins, cut it in strings, on which he
fastened a hook, caught some fish, fried and ate them. They refreshed
him, but were injurious to Farwell, who died soon after.” Davis had a
ball lodged in his body, and his right hand shot off; but on the whole,
he seems to have been less damaged than his companion. He came into
Berwick after being out fourteen days. Jones also had a ball lodged in
his body, but he likewise got into Saco after fourteen days, though not
in the best condition imaginable. “He had subsisted,” says an old
journal, “on the spontaneous vegetables of the forest; and cranberries
which he had eaten came out of wounds he had received in his body.”
This was also the case with Davis. The last two reached home at length,
safe if not sound, and lived many years in a crippled state to enjoy
their pension.

But alas! of the crippled Indians, and their adventures in the woods,—

“For as we are informed, so thick and fast they fell,
Scarce twenty of their number at night did get home well,”—


how many balls lodged with them, how fared their cranberries, what
Berwick or Saco they got into, and finally what pension or township was
granted them, there is no journal to tell.

It is stated in the History of Dunstable, that just before his last
march, Lovewell was warned to beware of the ambuscades of the enemy,
but “he replied, ‘that he did not care for them,’ and bending down a
small elm beside which he was standing into a bow, declared ‘that he
would treat the Indians in the same way.’ This elm is still standing
[in Nashua], a venerable and magnificent tree.”

Meanwhile, having passed the Horseshoe Interval in Tyngsborough, where
the river makes a sudden bend to the northwest,—for our reflections
have anticipated our progress somewhat,—we were advancing farther into
the country and into the day, which last proved almost as golden as the
preceding, though the slight bustle and activity of the Monday seemed
to penetrate even to this scenery. Now and then we had to muster all
our energy to get round a point, where the river broke rippling over
rocks, and the maples trailed their branches in the stream, but there
was generally a backwater or eddy on the side, of which we took
advantage. The river was here about forty rods wide and fifteen feet
deep. Occasionally one ran along the shore, examining the country, and
visiting the nearest farm-houses, while the other followed the windings
of the stream alone, to meet his companion at some distant point, and
hear the report of his adventures; how the farmer praised the coolness
of his well, and his wife offered the stranger a draught of milk, or
the children quarrelled for the only transparency in the window that
they might get sight of the man at the well. For though the country
seemed so new, and no house was observed by us, shut in between the
banks that sunny day, we did not have to travel far to find where men
inhabited, like wild bees, and had sunk wells in the loose sand and
loam of the Merrimack. There dwelt the subject of the Hebrew
scriptures, and the Esprit des Lois, where a thin vaporous smoke curled
up through the noon. All that is told of mankind, of the inhabitants of
the Upper Nile, and the Sunderbunds, and Timbuctoo, and the Orinoko,
was experience here. Every race and class of men was represented.
According to Belknap, the historian of New Hampshire, who wrote sixty
years ago, here too, perchance, dwelt “new lights,” and free thinking
men even then. “The people in general throughout the State,” it is
written, “are professors of the Christian religion in some form or
other. There is, however, a sort of _wise men_ who pretend to reject
it; but they have not yet been able to substitute a better in its
place.”

The other voyageur, perhaps, would in the mean while have seen a brown
hawk, or a woodchuck, or a musquash creeping under the alders.

We occasionally rested in the shade of a maple or a willow, and drew
forth a melon for our refreshment, while we contemplated at our leisure
the lapse of the river and of human life; and as that current, with its
floating twigs and leaves, so did all things pass in review before us,
while far away in cities and marts on this very stream, the old routine
was proceeding still. There is, indeed, a tide in the affairs of men,
as the poet says, and yet as things flow they circulate, and the ebb
always balances the flow. All streams are but tributary to the ocean,
which itself does not stream, and the shores are unchanged, but in
longer periods than man can measure. Go where we will, we discover
infinite change in particulars only, not in generals. When I go into a
museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that
the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked
the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that
the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men
lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable to-day. “Time drinketh up
the essence of every great and noble action which ought to be
performed, and is delayed in the execution.” So says Veeshnoo Sarma;
and we perceive that the schemers return again and again to common
sense and labor. Such is the evidence of history.

“Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the Suns.”


There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more
importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

There are many skilful apprentices, but few master workmen. On every
hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in
the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher.
Who does not see that heresies have some time prevailed, that reforms
have already taken place? All this worldly wisdom might be regarded as
the once unamiable heresy of some wise man. Some interests have got a
footing on the earth which we have not made sufficient allowance for.
Even they who first built these barns and cleared the land thus, had
some valor. The abrupt epochs and chasms are smoothed down in history
as the inequalities of the plain are concealed by distance. But unless
we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but
apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.

Now that we are casting away these melon seeds, how can we help feeling
reproach? He who eats the fruit, should at least plant the seed; aye,
if possible, a better seed than that whose fruit he has enjoyed. Seeds!
there are seeds enough which need only to be stirred in with the soil
where they lie, by an inspired voice or pen, to bear fruit of a divine
flavor. O thou spendthrift! Defray thy debt to the world; eat not the
seed of institutions, as the luxurious do, but plant it rather, while
thou devourest the pulp and tuber for thy subsistence; that so,
perchance, one variety may at last be found worthy of preservation.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the
infinite leisure a

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