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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.

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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

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wriggle neither way.  All men are partially buried in the grave
of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above
ground.  Better are the physically dead, for they more lively
rot.  Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant.  A man's
life should be constantly as fresh as this river.  It should be
the same channel, but a new water every instant.

               "Virtues as rivers pass,
     But still remains that virtuous man there was."

Most men have no inclination, no rapids, no cascades, but
marshes, and alligators, and miasma instead.  We read that when
in the expedition of Alexander, Onesicritus was sent forward to
meet certain of the Indian sect of Gymnosophists, and he had told
them of those new philosophers of the West, Pythagoras, Socrates,
and Diogenes, and their doctrines, one of them named Dandamis
answered, that "They appeared to him to have been men of genius,
but to have lived with too passive a regard for the laws." The
philosophers of the West are liable to this rebuke still.  "They
say that Lieou-hia-hoei, and Chao-lien did not sustain to the end
their resolutions, and that they dishonored their character.