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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.

etc/rivers.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

fast the thief and murderer, it lets itself go loose.  When I
have not paid the tax which the State demanded for that
protection which I did not want, itself has robbed me; when I
have asserted the liberty it presumed to declare, itself has
imprisoned me.  Poor creature! if it knows no better I will not
blame it.  If it cannot live but by these means, I can.  I do not
wish, it happens, to be associated with Massachusetts, either in
holding slaves or in conquering Mexico.  I am a little better
than herself in these respects.--As for Massachusetts, that huge
she Briareus, Argus and Colchian Dragon conjoined, set to watch
the Heifer of the Constitution and the Golden Fleece, we would
not warrant our respect for her, like some compositions, to
preserve its qualities through all weathers.--Thus it has
happened, that not the Arch Fiend himself has been in my way, but
these toils which tradition says were originally spun to obstruct
him.  They are cobwebs and trifling obstacles in an earnest man's
path, it is true, and at length one even becomes attached to his
unswept and undusted garret.  I love man--kind, but I hate the
institutions of the dead un-kind.  Men execute nothing so
faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and
letter.  _They_ rule this world, and the living are but their
executors.  Such foundation too have our lectures and our
sermons, commonly.  They are all _Dudleian;_ and piety derives
its origin still from that exploit of _pius Aeneas_, who bore his
father, Anchises, on his shoulders from the ruins of Troy.  Or
rather, like some Indian tribes, we bear about with us the
mouldering relics of our ancestors on our shoulders.  If, for
instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the
merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him,
that he who is _living near_ him, sometimes even sustains him,
but never the State.  Its officer, as a living man, may have
human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an
institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit
superior to his prison key or his staff.  Herein is the tragedy;
that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called
wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior
and brutal ones.  Hence come war and slavery in; and what else
may not come in by this opening?  But certainly there are modes
by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not
prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.

     "Now turn again, turn again, said the pinder,
     For a wrong way you have gone,
     For you have forsaken the king's highway,
     And made a path over the corn."

Undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, because society is
not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition
of some snakes which I have seen in early spring, with alternate
portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could
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.
Their language was in harmony with reason and justice; while
their acts were in harmony with the sentiments of men."

Chateaubriand said: "There are two things which grow stronger in
the breast of man, in proportion as he advances in years: the
love of country and religion.  Let them be never so much
forgotten in youth, they sooner or later present themselves to us
arrayed in all their charms, and excite in the recesses of our
hearts an attachment justly due to their beauty." It may be so.
But even this infirmity of noble minds marks the gradual decay of
youthful hope and faith.  It is the allowed infidelity of age.
There is a saying of the Yoloffs, "He who was born first has the
greatest number of old clothes," consequently M.  Chateaubriand
has more old clothes than I have.  It is comparatively a faint
and reflected beauty that is admired, not an essential and
intrinsic one.  It is because the old are weak, feel their
mortality, and think that they have measured the strength of man.
They will not boast; they will be frank and humble.  Well, let
them have the few poor comforts they can keep.  Humility is still
a very human virtue.  They look back on life, and so see not into
the future.  The prospect of the young is forward and unbounded,
mingling the future with the present.  In the declining day the
thoughts make haste to rest in darkness, and hardly look forward
to the ensuing morning.  The thoughts of the old prepare for
night and slumber.  The same hopes and prospects are not for him
who stands upon the rosy mountain-tops of life, and him who
expects the setting of his earthly day.

I must conclude that Conscience, if that be the name of it, was
not given us for no purpose, or for a hinderance.  However
flattering order and expediency may look, it is but the repose of
a lethargy, and we will choose rather to be awake, though it be
stormy, and maintain ourselves on this earth and in this life, as
we may, without signing our death-warrant.  Let us see if we
cannot stay here, where He has put us, on his own
conditions.  Does not his law reach as far as his light?  The
expedients of the nations clash with one another, only the
absolutely right is expedient for all.

There are some passages in the Antigone of Sophocles, well known
to scholars, of which I am reminded in this connection.  Antigone
has resolved to sprinkle sand on the dead body of her brother
Polynices, notwithstanding the edict of King Creon condemning to
death that one who should perform this service, which the Greeks
deemed so important, for the enemy of his country; but Ismene,
who is of a less resolute and noble spirit, declines taking part
with her sister in this work, and says,--

"I, therefore, asking those under the earth to consider me, that
I am compelled to do thus, will obey those who are placed in