[1843.]
The needles of the pine
All to the west incline.
CONCORD, _July_ 19, 1842.
Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the
mountains in our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a
grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all
the allusions of poets and travellers; whether with Homer, on a spring
morning, we sat down on the many-peaked Olympus, or, with Virgil and
his compeers, roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, or with
Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and Teneriffe. Thus we spoke
our mind to them, standing on the Concord cliffs.—
With frontier strength ye stand your ground,
With grand content ye circle round,
Tumultuous silence for all sound,
Ye distant nursery of rills,
Monadnock, and the Peterboro’ hills;
Like some vast fleet,
Sailing through rain and sleet,
Through winter’s cold and summer’s heat;
Still holding on, upon your high emprise,
Until ye find a shore amid the skies;
Not skulking close to land,
With cargo contraband.
For they who sent a venture out by ye
Have set the sun to see
Their honesty.
Ships of the line, each one,
Ye to the westward run,
Always before the gale,
Under a press of sail,
With weight of metal all untold.
I seem to feel ye, in my firm seat here,
Immeasurable depth of hold,
And breadth of beam, and length of running gear.
Methinks ye take luxurious pleasure
In your novel western leisure;
So cool your brows, and freshly blue,
As Time had nought for ye to do;
For ye lie at your length,
An unappropriated strength,
Unhewn primeval timber,
For knees so stiff, for masts so limber;
The stock of which new earths are made,
One day to be our western trade,
Fit for the stanchions of a world
Which through the seas of space is hurled.
While we enjoy a lingering ray,
Ye still o’ertop the western day,
Reposing yonder, on God’s croft,
Like solid stacks of hay.
Edged with silver, and with gold,
The clouds hang o’er in damask fold,
And with such depth of amber light
The west is dight,
Where still a few rays slant,
That even heaven seems extravagant.
On the earth’s edge mountains and trees
Stand as they were on air graven,
Or as the vessels in a haven
Await the morning breeze.
I fancy even
Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven;
And yonder still, in spite of history’s page,
Linger the golden and the silver age;
Upon the laboring gale
The news of future centuries is brought,
And of new dynasties of thought,
From your remotest vale.
But special I remember thee,
Wachusett, who like me
Standest alone without society.
Thy far blue eye,
A remnant of the sky,
Seen through the clearing or the gorge,
Or from the windows on the forge,
Doth leaven all it passes by.
Nothing is true,
But stands ’tween me and you,
Thou western pioneer,
Who know’st not shame nor fear,
By venturous spirit driven,
Under the eaves of heaven,
And can’st expand thee there,
And breathe enough of air?
Upholding heaven, holding down earth,
Thy pastime from thy birth,
Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other;
May I approve myself thy worthy brother!
At length, like Rasselas, and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we
resolved to scale the blue wall which bound the western horizon, though
not without misgivings, that thereafter no visible fairy land would
exist for us. But we will not leap at once to our journey’s end, though
near, but imitate Homer, who conducts his reader over the plain, and
along the resounding sea, though it be but to the tent of Achilles. In
the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where men go
and come. The landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest
thinker is the farthest travelled.
At a cool and early hour on a pleasant morning in July, my companion
and I passed rapidly through Acton and Stow, stopping to rest and
refresh us on the bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Assabet,
in the latter town. As we traversed the cool woods of Acton, with stout
staves in our hands, we were cheered by the song of the red-eye, the
thrushes, the phoebe, and the cuckoo; and as we passed through the open
country, we inhaled the fresh scent of every field, and all nature lay
passive, to be viewed and travelled. Every rail, every farm-house, seen
dimly in the twilight, every tinkling sound told of peace and purity,
and we moved happily along the dank roads, enjoying not such privacy as
the day leaves when it withdraws, but such as it has not profaned. It
was solitude with light; which is better than darkness. But anon, the
sound of the mower’s rifle was heard in the fields, and this, too,
mingled with the lowing kine.
This part of our route lay through the country of hops, which plant
perhaps supplies the want of the vine in American scenery, and may
remind the traveller of Italy, and the South of France, whether he
traverses the country when the hop-fields, as then, present solid and
regular masses of verdure, hanging in graceful festoons from pole to
pole; the cool coverts where lurk the gales which refresh the wayfarer;
or in September, when the women and children, and the neighbors from
far and near, are gathered to pick the hops into long troughs; or later
still, when the poles stand piled in vast pyramids in the yards, or lie
in heaps by the roadside.
The culture of the hop, with the processes of picking, drying in the
kiln, and packing for the market, as well as the uses to which it is
applied, so analogous to the culture and uses of the grape, may afford
a theme for future poets.
The mower in the adjacent meadow could not tell us the name of the
brook on whose banks we had rested, or whether it had any, but his
younger companion, perhaps his brother, knew that it was Great Brook.
Though they stood very near together in the field, the things they knew
were very far apart; nor did they suspect each other’s reserved
knowledge, till the stranger came by. In Bolton, while we rested on the
rails of a cottage fence, the strains of music which issued from
within, probably in compliment to us, sojourners, reminded us that thus
far men were fed by the accustomed pleasures. So soon did we,
wayfarers, begin to learn that man’s life is rounded with the same few
facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel
to find it new. The flowers grow more various ways than he. But coming
soon to higher land, which afforded a prospect of the mountains, we
thought we had not travelled in vain, if it were only to hear a truer
and wilder pronunciation of their names, from the lips of the
inhabitants; not _Way_-tatic, _Way_-chusett, but _Wor_-tatic,
_Wor_-chusett. It made us ashamed of our tame and civil pronunciation,
and we looked upon them as born and bred farther west than we. Their
tongues had a more generous accent than ours, as if breath was cheaper
where they wagged. A countryman, who speaks but seldom, talks
copiously, as it were, as his wife sets cream and cheese before you
without stint. Before noon we had reached the highlands overlooking the
valley of Lancaster, (affording the first fair and open prospect into
the west,) and there, on the top of a hill, in the shade of some oaks,
near to where a spring bubbled out from a leaden pipe, we rested during
the heat of the day, reading Virgil, and enjoying the scenery. It was
such a place as one feels to be on the outside of the earth, for from
it we could, in some measure, see the form and structure of the globe.
There lay Wachusett, the object of our journey, lowering upon us with
unchanged proportions, though with a less ethereal aspect than had
greeted our morning gaze, while further north, in successive order,
slumbered its sister mountains along the horizon.