EMERSON

The village of Concord, Massachusetts, lies an hour's ride from Boston,

upon the Great Northern Railway. It is one of those quiet New England

towns, whose few white houses, grouped upon the plain, make but a slight

impression upon the mind of the busy traveller hurrying to or from the

city. As the conductor shouts "Concord!" the busy traveller has scarcely

time to recall "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill" before the town has

vanished and he is darting through woods and fields as solitary as those

he has just left in New Hampshire. Yet as it vanishes he may chance to

"see" two or three spires, and as they rush behind the trees his eyes

fall upon a gleaming sheet of water. It is Walden Pond--or Walden Water,

as Orphic Alcott used to call it--whose virgin seclusion was a

just image of that of the little village, until one afternoon, some

half-dozen or more years since, a shriek, sharper than any that had

rung from Walden woods since the last war-whoop of the last Indians

of Musketaquid, announced to astonished Concord, drowsing in the river

meadows, that the nineteenth century had overtaken it. Yet long before

the material force of the age bound the town to the rest of the world,

the spiritual force of a single mind in it had attracted attention to

it, and made its lonely plains as dear to many widely scattered minds as

the groves of the Academy or the vineyards of Vaucluse.

Except in causing the erection of the railway buildings and several

dwellings near it, steam has not much changed Concord. It is yet one of

the quiet country towns whose charm is incredible to all but those who,

by loving it, have found it worthy of love. The shire-town of the great

agricultural county of Middlesex, it is not disturbed by the feverish

throb of factories, nor by any roar of inexorable toil but the few puffs

of the locomotive. One day, during the autumn, it is thronged with

the neighboring farmers, who hold their high festival--the annual

cattle-show--there. But the calm tenor of Concord life is not varied,

even on that day, by anything more exciting than fat oxen and the

cud-chewing eloquence of the agricultural dinner. The population of the

region is composed of sturdy, sterling men, worthy representatives of

the ancestors who sowed along the Concord shores, with their seed-corn

and rye, the germs of a prodigious national greatness. At intervals

every day the rattle, roar, and whistle of the swift shuttle darting to

and from the metropolitan heart of New England, weaving prosperity upon

the land, remind those farmers in their silent fields that the great

world yet wags and wrestles. And the farmer-boy--sweeping with flashing

scythe through the river meadows, whose coarse grass glitters, apt for

mowing, in the early June morning--pauses as the whistle dies into the

distance, and, wiping his brow and whetting his blade anew, questions

the country-smitten citizen, the amateur Corydon struggling with

imperfect stroke behind him, of the mystic romance of city life.

The sluggish repose of the little river images the farmer-boy's life. He

bullies his oxen, and trembles at the locomotive. His wonder and fancy

stretch towards the great world beyond the barn-yard and the village

church as the torpid stream tends towards the ocean. The river, in

fact, seems the thread upon which all the beads of that rustic life

are strung--the clew to its tranquil character. If it were an impetuous

stream, dashing along as if it claimed and required the career to

which every American river is entitled, a career it would have. Wheels,

factories, shops, traders, factory-girls, boards of directors, dreary

white lines of boarding-houses, all the signs that indicate the spirit

of the age, and of the American age, would arise upon its margin.

Some shaven magician from State Street would run up by rail, and, from

proposals, maps, schedules of stock, etc., educe a spacious factory as

easily as Aladdin's palace arose from nothing. Instead of a dreaming,

pastoral poet of a village, Concord would be a rushing, whirling,

bustling manufacturer of a town, like its thrifty neighbor Lowell.

Many a fine equipage, flashing along city ways--many an

Elizabethan-Gothic-Grecian rural retreat, in which State Street woos Pan

and grows Arcadian in summer, would be reduced, in the last analysis,

to the Concord mills. Yet if these broad river meadows grew factories

instead of corn, they might perhaps lack another harvest, of which the

poet's thought is the sickle.

"One harvest from your field

Homeward brought the oxen strong.

Another crop your acres yield,

Which I gather in a song,"

sings Emerson, and again, as the afternoon light strikes pensive across

his memory, as over the fields below him:

"Knows he who tills this lonely field,

To reap its scanty corn,

What mystic crops his acres yield,

At midnight and at morn?"

The Concord River, upon whose winding shores the town has scattered its

few houses--as if, loitering over the plain some fervent day, it had

fallen asleep obedient to the slumberous spell, and had not since

awakened--is a languid, shallow stream, that loiters through broad

meadows, which fringe it with rushes and long grasses. Its sluggish

current scarcely moves the autumn leaves showered upon it by a few

maples that lean over the Assabet--as one of its branches is named.

Yellow lily-buds and leathery lily-pads tessellate its surface, and the

white water-lilies--pale, proud Ladies of Shalott--bare their virgin

breasts to the sun in the seclusion of its distant reaches. Clustering

vines of wild grape hang its wooded shores with a tapestry of the South

and the Rhine. The pickerel-weed marks with blue spikes of flowers

the points where small tributary brooks flow in, and along the dusky

windings of those brooks cardinal-flowers with a scarlet splendor

paint the tropics upon New England green. All summer long, from founts

unknown, in the upper counties, from some anonymous pond or wooded

hillside moist with springs, steals the gentle river through the plain,

spreading at one point above the town into a little lake, called by the

farmers "Fairhaven Bay", as if all its lesser names must share the

sunny significance of Concord. Then, shrinking again, alarmed at its own

boldness, it dreams on towards the Merrimac and the sea.

The absence of factories has already implied its shallowness and

slowness. In truth it is a very slow river, belonging much more to the

Indian than to the Yankee; so much so, indeed, that until within a very

few years there was an annual visit to its shores from a few sad heirs

of its old masters, who pitched a group of tents in the meadows, and

wove their tidy baskets and strung their beads in unsmiling silence. It

was the same thing that I saw in Jerusalem among the Jews. Every Friday

they repair to the remains of the old temple wall, and pray and wail,

kneeling upon the pavement and kissing the stones. But that passionate

Oriental regret was not more impressive than this silent homage of a

waning race, who, as they beheld the unchanged river, knew that, unlike

it, the last drops of their existence were gradually flowing away, and

that for their tribes there shall be no ingathering.

So shallow is the stream that the amateur Corydons who embark at morning

to explore its remoter shores will, not infrequently in midsummer, find

their boat as suddenly tranquil and motionless as the river, having

placidly grounded upon its oozy bottom. Or, returning at evening, they

may lean over the edge as they lie at length in the boat, and float

with the almost imperceptible current, brushing the tips of the long

water-grass and reeds below them in the stream--a river jungle, in which

lurk pickerel and trout--with the sensation of a bird drifting upon

soft evening air over the tree-tops. No available or profitable craft

navigate these waters, and animated gentlemen from the city who run up

for "a mouthful of fresh air" cannot possibly detect the final cause of

such a river. Yet the dreaming idler has a place on maps and a name in

history.

Near the town it is crossed by three or four bridges. One is a massive

structure to help the railroad over. The stern, strong pile readily

betrays that it is part of good, solid stock, owned in the right

quarter. Close by it is a little arched stone bridge, auxiliary to a

great road leading to some vague region of the world called Acton upon

guide-posts and on maps. Just beyond these bridges the river bends and

forgets the railroad, but it is grateful to the graceful arch of the

little stone bridge for making its curve more picturesque, and, as it

muses towards the Old Manse, listlessly brushing the lilies, it wonders

if Ellery Channing, who lives beyond, upon a hill-side sloping to the

shore, wrote his poem of "The Bridge" to that particular one. There

are two or three wooden bridges also, always combining well with the

landscape, always making and suggesting pictures.

The Concord, as I said, has a name in history. Near one of the wooden

bridges you turn aside from the main road, close by the Old Mause--whose

mosses of mystic hue were gathered by Hawthorne, who lived there for

three years--and a few steps bring you to the river and to a small

monument upon its brink. It is a narrow, grassy way; not a field nor a

meadow, but of that shape and character which would perplex the animated

stranger from the city, who would see, also, its unfitness for a

building-lot. The narrow, grassy way is the old road, which in the month

of April, 1775, led to a bridge that crossed the stream at this spot.

And upon the river's margin, upon the bridge and the shore beyond, took

place the sharp struggle between the Middlesex farmers and the scarlet

British soldiers known in tradition as "Concord fight". The small

monument records the day and the event. When it was erected Emerson

wrote the following hymn for the ceremony: