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 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 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, 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 Upon this effort to call up the ghost 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! |