WE had been wandering for many days Through the rough northern country. We had seen

The sunset, with its bars of purple cloud,

Like a new heaven, shine upward from the lake

Of Winnepiseogee; and had felt
The sunrise breezes, midst the leafyisles
Which stoop their summer beauty to
the lips

Of the bright waters. We had checked our steeds,

Silent with wonder, where the mountain wall

Is piled to heaven; and, through the narrow rift

Of the vast rocks, against whose rugged feet

Beats the mad torrent with perpetual

Q'er-roofing the vast portal of the land

Danand the wall of mountaina

Rising behind Umbagog's eastern pines, Like a great Indian camp-fire; and its beams

At midnight spanning with a bridge of silver

The Marrimack by Uncanoonuc's falls

Sweet human faces, white clouds of the noon,

Slant starlight glimpses through the dewy leaves,

And tenderest moonrise. 'T was, in truth, a study,

To mark his spirit, alternating between
A decent and professional gravity
And an irreverent mirthfulness, which
often

Laughed in the face of his divinity, Plucked off the sacred ephod, quite unshrined

The oracle, and for the pattern priest Left us the man. A shrewd, sagacious merchant,

To whom the soiled sheet found in Crawford's inn,

Giving the latest news of city stocks And sales of cotton, had a deeper meanBaling

Than the great presence of the awful mountains

Glorified by the sunset; and his daughter

A delicate flower on whom had blown too long

It c

That as we turned upon our h

A drear northeastern storm ca ing up

The valley of the Saco; and t Who had stood with us upo Washington,

Her brown locks ruffled by which whirled

In gusts around its sharp cold Who had joined our gay tro in the streams Which lave that giant's feet laugh was heard

Like a bird's carol on the sunri Which swelled our sail an

lake's green islands, Shrank from its harsh, chill br visibly drooped Like a flower in the frost. S quiet inn

Which looks from Conway mountains piled Heavily against the horizon of t Like summer thunder-clouds, our home:

And while the mist hung over hills,

And the cold wind-driven r all day long

Beat their sad music upon roof We strove to cheer our gentle

The lawyer in the pauses of th Went angling down the Saco turning,

Recounted his adventures and Gave us the history of his scal Mingling with ludicrous yet apt Of barbarous law Latin, passa From Izaak Walton's Angler,

As the flower-skirted streams

brary,

A well-thumbed Bunyan, with its nice wood pictures

Of scaly fiends and angels not unlike them,

Watts' unmelodious psalms, - Astrology's

Last home, a musty pile of almanacs,
And an old chronicle of border wars
And Indian history. And, as I read
A story of the marriage of the Chief
Of Saugus to the dusky Weetamoo,
Daughter of Passaconaway, who dwelt
In the old time upon the Merrimack,
Our fair one, in the playful exercise
Of her prerogative, -the right divine
Of youth and beauty, bade us versify
The legend, and with ready pencil

sketched

Its plan and outlines, laughingly as

signing

To each his part, and barring our excuses With absolute will. So, like the cavaliers

Whose voices still are heard in the Ro

mance

Of silver-tongued Boccaccio, on the banks

Of Arno, with soft tales of love beguiling The ear of languid beauty, plague-exiled From stately Florence, we rehearsed our rhymes

To their fair auditor, and shared by turns Her lind approval and her playful cen

sure.

25

It may be that these fragments owe alone

To the fair setting of their circumstances,

The associations of time, scene. and audience,

Their place amid the pictures which fill up

The chambers of my memory. Yet I

trust

That some, who sigh, while wandering in thought,

Pilgrims of Romance o'er the olden world,

-our sea-like

That our broad land, lakes and mountains

Piled to the clouds, our rivers overhung

By forests which have known no other change

For ages, than the budding and the fall Of leaves,

- our valleys lovelier than those Which the old poets sang of,- should but figure

On the apocryphal chart of speculation As pastures, wood-lots, mill-sites, with the privileges,

Rights, and appurtenances, which make

up A Yankee Paradise,

To

-unsung, un

known, beautiful tradition;

names,

even their

Whose melody yet lingers like the last
Vibration of the red man's requiem,
Exchanged for syllables significant
Of cotton-mill and rail-car, will look
kindly

Upon this effort to call up the ghost
Of our dim Past, and listen with pleased

ear

To the responses of the questioned Shade.

I. THE MERRIMACK.

O CHILD of that white-crested mountain whose springs

Gush forth in the shade of the cliff eagle's wings,

There the boy shaped his arrows, and there the shy maid

Wove her many-hued baskets and bright wampum braid.

O Stream of the Mountains! if answer of thine

Could rise from thy waters to question of mine,

Methinks through the din of thy thronged banks a moan

Of sorrow would swell for the days which have gone.

Not for thee the dull jar of the loom and the wheel,

The gliding of shuttles, the ringing of steel;

But that old voice of waters, of bird and of breeze,

The dip of the wild-fowl, the rustling of trees!