—“all the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.”
The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it. Old
Drayton thought that a man that lived here, and would be a poet, for
instance, should have in him certain “brave, translunary things,” and a
“fine madness” should possess his brain. Certainly it were as well,
that he might be up to the occasion. That is a superfluous wonder,
which Dr. Johnson expresses at the assertion of Sir Thomas Browne that
“his life has been a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not
history but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.” The
wonder is, rather, that all men do not assert as much. That would be a
rare praise, if it were true, which was addressed to Francis
Beaumont,—“Spectators sate part in your tragedies.”
Think what a mean and wretched place this world is; that half the time
we have to light a lamp that we may see to live in it. This is half our
life. Who would undertake the enterprise if it were all? And, pray,
what more has day to offer? A lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil,
say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less
obstruction. Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints,
we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.
I make ye an offer,
Ye gods, hear the scoffer,
The scheme will not hurt you,
If ye will find goodness, I will find virtue.
Though I am your creature,
And child of your nature,
I have pride still unbended,
And blood undescended,
Some free independence,
And my own descendants.
I cannot toil blindly,
Though ye behave kindly,
And I swear by the rood,
I’ll be slave to no God.
If ye will deal plainly,
I will strive mainly,
If ye will discover,
Great plans to your lover,
And give him a sphere
Somewhat larger than here.
“Verily, my angels! I was abashed on account of my servant, who had no
Providence but me; therefore did I pardon him.”—_The Gulistan of Sadi._
Most people with whom I talk, men and women even of some originality
and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dried,—very
_dry_, I assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and
powder-post, methinks,—which they set up between you and them in the
shortest intercourse; an ancient and tottering frame with all its
boards blown off. They do not walk without their bed. Some, to me,
seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations, are
for them everlastingly settled,—as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the
like. These are like the everlasting hills to them. But in all my
wanderings I never came across the least vestige of authority for these
things. They have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower
of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate. The wisest man
preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a
cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. If I ever see more
clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is
clearer. To see from earth to heaven, and see there standing, still a
fixture, that old Jewish scheme! What right have you to hold up this
obstacle to my understanding you, to your understanding me! You did not
invent it; it was imposed on you. Examine your authority. Even Christ,
we fear, had his scheme, his conformity to tradition, which slightly
vitiates his teaching. He had not swallowed all formulas. He preached
some mere doctrines. As for me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now only
the subtilest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning
sky. Your scheme must be the framework of the universe; all other
schemes will soon be ruins. The perfect God in his revelations of
himself has never got to the length of one such proposition as you, his
prophets, state. Have you learned the alphabet of heaven and can count
three? Do you know the number of God’s family? Can you put mysteries
into words? Do you presume to fable of the ineffable? Pray, what
geographer are you, that speak of heaven’s topography? Whose friend are
you that speak of God’s personality? Do you, Miles Howard, think that
he has made you his confidant? Tell me of the height of the mountains
of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of
the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad. Yet
we have a sort of family history of our God,—so have the Tahitians of
theirs,—and some old poet’s grand imagination is imposed on us as
adamantine everlasting truth, and God’s own word! Pythagoras says,
truly enough, “A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of
God”; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in
literature.
The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having
been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church
and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the
yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes.
It was hard to get the commentaries out of one’s head and taste its
true flavor.—I think that Pilgrim’s Progress is the best sermon which
has been preached from this text; almost all other sermons that I have
heard, or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this.—It would be
a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the
book has been edited by Christians. In fact, I love this book rarely,
though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which I am permitted to
dream. Having come to it so recently and freshly, it has the greater
charm, so that I cannot find any to talk with about it. I never read a
novel, they have so little real life and thought in them. The reading
which I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it
happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindoos, the
Chinese, and the Persians, than of the Hebrews, which I have come to
last. Give me one of these Bibles and you have silenced me for a while.
When I recover the use of my tongue, I am wont to worry my neighbors
with the new sentences; but commonly they cannot see that there is any
wit in them. Such has been my experience with the New Testament. I have
not yet got to the crucifixion, I have read it over so many times. I
should love dearly to read it aloud to my friends, some of whom are
seriously inclined; it is so good, and I am sure that they have never
heard it, it fits their case exactly, and we should enjoy it so much
together,—but I instinctively despair of getting their ears. They soon
show, by signs not to be mistaken, that it is inexpressibly wearisome
to them. I do not mean to imply that I am any better than my neighbors;
for, alas! I know that I am only as good, though I love better books
than they.
It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which
the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with
which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no
appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals. I know of no
book that has so few readers. There is none so truly strange, and
heretical, and unpopular. To Christians, no less than Greeks and Jews,
it is foolishness and a stumbling-block. There are, indeed, severe
things in it which no man should read aloud more than once.—“Seek first
the kingdom of heaven.”—“Lay not up for yourselves treasures on
earth.”—“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give
to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.”—“For what is a
man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”—Think of this,
Yankees!—“Verily, I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of
mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder
place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto
you.”—Think of repeating these things to a New England audience!
thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly, till there are three barrels of
sermons! Who, without cant, can read them aloud? Who, without cant, can
hear them, and not go out of the meeting-house? They never _were_ read,
they never _were_ heard. Let but one of these sentences be rightly
read, from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one
stone of that meeting-house upon another.
Yet the New Testament treats of man and man’s so-called spiritual
affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to
alone content me, who am not interested solely in man’s religious or
moral nature, or in man even. I have not the most definite designs on
the future. Absolutely speaking, Do unto others as you would that they
should do unto you, is by no means a golden rule, but the best of
current silver. An honest man would have but little occasion for it. It
is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case. The book has
never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance.
Christ was a sublime actor on the stage of the world. He knew what he
was thinking of when he said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my
words shall not pass away.” I draw near to him at such a time. Yet he
taught mankind but imperfectly how to live; his thoughts were all
directed toward another world. There is another kind of success than
his. Even here we have a sort of living to get, and must buffet it
somewhat longer. There are various tough problems yet to solve, and we
must make shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life
as we can.
A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents
a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for
Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some,
but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his
leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the
solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland
streams.
Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything,
because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them
in the end. The sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very
subtle policy, far finer than the politicians, and the world is very
successfully ruled by them as the policemen. It is not worth the while
to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does
not, and ought not to monopolize the whole of our lives, any more than
the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part. I
have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former
indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at
length gave them no peace. They did not know when to swallow their cud,
and their lives of course yielded no milk.
Conscience is instinct bred in the house,
Feeling and Thinking propagate the sin
By an unnatural breeding in and in.
I say, Turn it out doors,
Into the moors.
I love a life whose plot is simple,
And does not thicken with every pimple,
A soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it,
That makes the universe no worse than ’t finds it.
I love an earnest soul,
Whose mighty joy and sorrow
Are not drowned in a bowl,
And brought to life to-morrow;
That lives one tragedy,
And not seventy;
A conscience worth keeping,
Laughing not weeping;
A conscience wise and steady,
And forever ready;
Not changing with events,
Dealing in compliments;
A conscience exercised about
Large things, where one _may_ doubt.
I love a soul not all of wood,
Predestinated to be good,
But true to the backbone
Unto itself alone,
And false to none;
Born to its own affairs,
Its own joys and own cares;
By whom the work which God begun
Is finished, and not undone;
Taken up where he left off,
Whether to worship or to scoff;
If not good, why then evil,
If not good god, good devil.
Goodness!—you hypocrite, come out of that,
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
I have no patience towards
Such conscientious cowards.
Give me simple laboring folk,
Who love their work,
Whose virtue is a song
To cheer God along.
I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some
meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I
was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a
church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word
spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was “breaking the Lord’s
fourth commandment,” and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone,
the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary
work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to
trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did
not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The
country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a
village, the church, not only really but from association, is the
ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human
nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples
as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. There are few
things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the
streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher
shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning
the quiet atmosphere of the day. You fancy him to have taken off his
coat, as when men are about to do hot and dirty work.
If I should ask the minister of Middlesex to let me speak in his pulpit
on a Sunday, he would object, because I do not _pray_ as he does, or
because I am not _ordained_. What under the sun are these things?
Really, there is no infidelity, now-a-days, so great as that which
prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. The sealer of
the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine. The church is a sort of
hospital for men’s souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for
their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their
Retreat or Sailor’s Sung Harbor, where you may see a row of religious
cripples sitting outside in sunny weather. Let not the apprehension
that he may one day have to occupy a ward therein, discourage the
cheerful labors of the able-souled man. While he remembers the sick in
their extremities, let him not look thither as to his goal. One is sick
at heart of this pagoda worship. It is like the beating of gongs in a
Hindoo subterranean temple. In dark places and dungeons the preacher’s
words might perhaps strike root and grow, but not in broad daylight in
any part of the world that I know. The sound of the Sabbath bell far
away, now breaking on these shores, does not awaken pleasing
associations, but melancholy and sombre ones rather. One involuntarily
rests on his oar, to humor his unusually meditative mood. It is as the
sound of many catechisms and religious books twanging a canting peal
round the earth, seeming to issue from some Egyptian temple and echo
along the shore of the Nile, right opposite to Pharaoh’s palace and
Moses in the bulrushes, startling a multitude of storks and alligators
basking in the sun.
Everywhere “good men” sound a retreat, and the word has gone forth to
fall back on innocence. Fall forward rather on to whatever there is
there. Christianity only hopes. It has hung its harp on the willows,
and cannot sing a song in a strange land. It has dreamed a sad dream,
and does not yet welcome the morning with joy. The mother tells her
falsehoods to her child, but, thank Heaven, the child does not grow up
in its parent’s shadow. Our mother’s faith has not grown with her
experience. Her experience has been too much for her. The lesson of
life was too hard for her to learn.
It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be
incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the
personality of God. Some Earl of Bridgewater, thinking it better late
than never, has provided for it in his will. It is a sad mistake. In
reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author’s moral
reflections, and the words “Providence” and “He” scattered along the
page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. What he
calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. He
should know better than expose himself, and keep his foul sores covered
till they are quite healed. There is more religion in men’s science
than there is science in their religion. Let us make haste to the
report of the committee on swine.
A man’s real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an
article of his faith. The last is never adopted. This it is that
permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does. And
yet he clings anxiously to his creed, as to a straw, thinking that that
does him good service because his sheet anchor does not drag.
In most men’s religion, the ligature, which should be its umbilical
cord connecting them with divinity, is rather like that thread which
the accomplices of Cylon held in their hands when they went abroad from
the temple of Minerva, the other end being attached to the statue of
the goddess. But frequently, as in their case, the thread breaks, being
stretched, and they are left without an asylum.
“A good and pious man reclined his head on the bosom of contemplation,
and was absorbed in the ocean of a revery. At the instant when he
awaked from his vision, one of his friends, by way of pleasantry, said,
What rare gift have you brought us from that garden, where you have
been recreating? He replied, I fancied to myself and said, when I can
reach the rose-bower, I will fill my lap with the flowers, and bring
them as a present to my friends; but when I got there, the fragrance of
the roses so intoxicated me, that the skirt dropped from my hands.——‘O
bird of dawn! learn the warmth of affection from the moth; for that
scorched creature gave up the ghost, and uttered not a groan: These
vain pretenders are ignorant of him they seek after; for of him that
knew him we never heard again:—O thou! who towerest above the flights
of conjecture, opinion, and comprehension; whatever has been reported
of thee we have heard and read; the congregation is dismissed, and life
drawn to a close; and we still rest at our first encomium of
thee!’”—_Sadi_.
By noon we were let down into the Merrimack through the locks at
Middlesex, just above Pawtucket Falls, by a serene and liberal-minded
man, who came quietly from his book, though his duties, we supposed,
did not require him to open the locks on Sundays. With him we had a
just and equal encounter of the eyes, as between two honest men.
The movements of the eyes express the perpetual and unconscious
courtesy of the parties. It is said, that a rogue does not look you in
the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his
reputation to establish. I have seen some who did not know when to turn
aside their eyes in meeting yours. A truly confident and magnanimous
spirit is wiser than to contend for the mastery in such encounters.
Serpents alone conquer by the steadiness of their gaze. My friend looks
me in the face and sees me, that is all.
The best relations were at once established between us and this man,
and though few words were spoken, he could not conceal a visible
interest in us and our excursion. He was a lover of the higher
mathematics, as we found, and in the midst of some vast sunny problem,
when we overtook him and whispered our conjectures. By this man we were
presented with the freedom of the Merrimack. We now felt as if we were
fairly launched on the ocean-stream of our voyage, and were pleased to
find that our boat would float on Merrimack water. We began again
busily to put in practice those old arts of rowing, steering, and
paddling. It seemed a strange phenomenon to us that the two rivers
should mingle their waters so readily, since we had never associated
them in our thoughts.
As we glided over the broad bosom of the Merrimack, between Chelmsford
and Dracut, at noon, here a quarter of a mile wide, the rattling of our
oars was echoed over the water to those villages, and their slight
sounds to us. Their harbors lay as smooth and fairy-like as the Lido,
or Syracuse, or Rhodes, in our imagination, while, like some strange
roving craft, we flitted past what seemed the dwellings of noble
home-staying men, seemingly as conspicuous as if on an eminence, or
floating upon a tide which came up to those villagers’ breasts. At a
third of a mile over the water we heard distinctly some children
repeating their catechism in a cottage near the shore, while in the
broad shallows between, a herd of cows stood lashing their sides, and
waging war with the flies.
Two hundred years ago other catechizing than this was going on here;
for here came the Sachem Wannalancet, and his people, and sometimes
Tahatawan, our Concord Sachem, who afterwards had a church at home, to
catch fish at the falls; and here also came John Eliot, with the Bible
and Catechism, and Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, and other tracts,
done into the Massachusetts tongue, and taught them Christianity
meanwhile. “This place,” says Gookin, referring to Wamesit,
“being an ancient and capital seat of Indians, they come to fish; and
this good man takes this opportunity to spread the net of the gospel,
to fish for their souls.”—“May 5th, 1674,” he continues, “according to
our usual custom, Mr. Eliot and myself took our journey to Wamesit, or
Pawtuckett; and arriving there that evening, Mr. Eliot preached to as
many of them as could be got together, out of Matt. xxii. 1-14, the
parable of the marriage of the king’s son. We met at the wigwam of one
called Wannalancet, about two miles from the town, near Pawtuckett
falls, and bordering upon Merrimak river. This person, Wannalancet, is
the eldest son of old Pasaconaway, the chiefest sachem of Pawtuckett.
He is a sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty.
He hath been always loving and friendly to the English.” As yet,
however, they had not prevailed on him to embrace the Christian
religion. “But at this time,” says Gookin, “May 6, 1674,”—“after some
deliberation and serious pause, he stood up, and made a speech to this
effect:—‘I must acknowledge I have, all my days, used to pass in an old
canoe, (alluding to his frequent custom to pass in a canoe upon the
river,) and now you exhort me to change and leave my old canoe, and
embark in a new canoe, to which I have hitherto been unwilling; but now
I yield up myself to your advice, and enter into a new canoe, and do
engage to pray to God hereafter.’” One “Mr. Richard Daniel, a gentleman
that lived in Billerica,” who with other “persons of quality” was
present, “desired brother Eliot to tell the sachem from him, that it
may be, while he went in his old canoe, he passed in a quiet stream;
but the end thereof was death and destruction to soul and body. But now
he went into a new canoe, perhaps he would meet with storms and trials,
but yet he should be encouraged to persevere, for the end of his voyage
would be everlasting rest.”—“Since that time, I hear this sachem doth
persevere, and is a constant and diligent hearer of God’s word, and
sanctifieth the Sabbath, though he doth travel to Wamesit meeting every
Sabbath, which is above two miles; and though sundry of his people have
deserted him, since he subjected to the gospel, yet he continues and
persists.”— _Gookin’s Hist. Coll. of the Indians in New England_, 1674.
Already, as appears from the records, “At a General Court held at
Boston in New England, the 7th of the first month,
1643-4.”—“Wassamequin, Nashoonon, Kutchamaquin, Massaconomet, and Squaw
Sachem, did voluntarily submit themselves” to the 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.
It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these
shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers,
and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in
the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the
sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their
way downward to the sea. “And is it not pretty sport,” wrote Captain
John Smith, who was on this coast as early as 1614, “to pull up
twopence, sixpence, and twelvepence, as fast as you can haul and veer a
line?”—“And what sport doth yield a more pleasing content, and less
hurt or charge, than angling with a hook, and crossing the sweet air
from isle to isle, over the silent streams of a calm sea.”
On the sandy shore, opposite the Glass-house village in Chelmsford, at
the Great Bend where we landed to rest us and gather a few wild plums,
we discovered the _Campanula rotundifolia_, a new flower to us, the
harebell of the poets, which is common to both hemispheres, growing
close to the water. Here, in the shady branches of an apple-tree on the
sand, we took our nooning, where there was not a zephyr to disturb the
repose of this glorious Sabbath day, and we reflected serenely on the
long past and successful labors of Latona.
“So silent is the cessile air,
That every cry and call,
The hills, and dales, and forest fair
Again repeats them all.
“The herds beneath some leafy trees,
Amidst the flowers they lie,
The stable ships upon the seas
Tend up their sails to dry.”
As we thus rested in the shade, or rowed leisurely along, we had
recourse, from time to time, to the Gazetteer, which was our Navigator,
and from its bald natural facts extracted the pleasure of poetry.
Beaver River comes in a little lower down, draining the meadows of
Pelham, Windham, and Londonderry. The Scotch-Irish settlers of the
latter town, according to this authority, were the first to introduce
the potato into New England, as well as the manufacture of linen cloth.
Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at
least of the best that is in literature. Indeed, the best books have a
use, like sticks and stones, which is above or beside their design, not
anticipated in the preface, nor concluded in the appendix. Even
Virgil’s poetry serves a very different use to me to-day from what it
did to his contemporaries. It has often an acquired and accidental
value merely, proving that man is still man in the world. It is
pleasant to meet with such still lines as,
“Jam læto turgent in palmite gemmæ”;
Now the buds swell on the joyful stem.
or
“Strata jacent passim sua quæque sub arbore poma”;
The apples lie scattered everywhere, each under its tree.
In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature
attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew
and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the
test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.
What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be
in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they
would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can
supply their place.
The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by
setting aside its requisitions. We can, therefore, publish only our
advertisement of it.
There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed, or
in some way musically measured,—is, in form as well as substance,
poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of
mankind need not have one rhythmless line.
Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As
naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a
poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable
success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. What
else have the Hindoos, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians
done, that can be told? It is the simplest relation of phenomena, and
describes the commonest sensations with more truth than science does,
and the latter at a distance slowly mimics its style and methods. The
poet sings how the blood flows in his veins. He performs his functions,
and is so well that he needs such stimulus to sing only as plants to
put forth leaves and blossoms. He would strive in vain to modulate the
remote and transient music which he sometimes hears, since his song is
a vital function like breathing, and an integral result like weight. It
is not the overflowing of life but its subsidence rather, and is drawn
from under the feet of the poet. It is enough if Homer but say the sun
sets. He is as serene as nature, and we can hardly detect the
enthusiasm of the bard. It is as if nature spoke. He presents to us the
simplest pictures of human life, so the child itself can understand
them, and the man must not think twice to appreciate his naturalness.
Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler
features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy
his similes. His more memorable passages are as naturally bright as
gleams of sunshine in misty weather. Nature furnishes him not only with
words, but with stereotyped lines and sentences from her mint.
“As from the clouds appears the full moon,
All shining, and then again it goes behind the shadowy clouds,
So Hector, at one time appeared among the foremost,
And at another in the rear, commanding; and all with brass
He shone, like to the lightning of ægis-bearing Zeus.”
He conveys the least information, even the hour of the day, with such
magnificence and vast expense of natural imagery, as if it were a
message from the gods.
“While it was dawn, and sacred day was advancing,
For that space the weapons of both flew fast, and the people fell;
But when now the woodcutter was preparing his morning meal,
In the recesses of the mountain, and had wearied his hands
With cutting lofty trees, and satiety came to his mind,
And the desire of sweet food took possession of his thoughts;
Then the Danaans, by their valor, broke the phalanxes,
Shouting to their companions from rank to rank.”
When the army of the Trojans passed the night under arms, keeping watch
lest the enemy should re-embark under cover of the dark,
“They, thinking great things, upon the neutral ground of war
Sat all the night; and many fires burned for them.
As when in the heavens the stars round the bright moon
Appear beautiful, and the air is without wind;
And all the heights, and the extreme summits,
And the wooded sides of the mountains appear; and from the heavens an
infinite ether is diffused,
And all the stars are seen, and the shepherd rejoices in his heart;
So between the ships and the streams of Xanthus
Appeared the fires of the Trojans before Ilium.
A thousand fires burned on the plain, and by each
Sat fifty, in the light of the blazing fire;
And horses eating white barley and corn,
Standing by the chariots, awaited fair-throned Aurora.”
The “white-armed goddess Juno,” sent by the Father of gods and men for
Iris and Apollo,
“Went down the Idæan mountains to far Olympus,
As when the mind of a man, who has come over much earth,
Sallies forth, and he reflects with rapid thoughts,
There was I, and there, and remembers many things;
So swiftly the august Juno hastening flew through the air,
And came to high Olympus.”
His scenery is always true, and not invented. He does not leap in
imagination from Asia to Greece, through mid air,
ἐπειὴ μάλα πολλὰ μεταξύ
Ὄυρεά τε σκιοέντα, θαλάσσα τε ἠχήεσσα.
for there are very many
Shady mountains and resounding seas between.
If his messengers repair but to the tent of Achilles, we do not wonder
how they got there, but accompany them step by step along the shore of
the resounding sea. Nestor’s account of the march of the Pylians
against the Epeians is extremely lifelike:—
“Then rose up to them sweet-worded Nestor, the shrill orator of the
Pylians,
And words sweeter than honey flowed from his tongue.”
This time, however, he addresses Patroclus alone: “A certain river,
Minyas by name, leaps seaward near to Arene, where we Pylians wait the
dawn, both horse and foot. Thence with all haste we sped us on the
morrow ere ’t was noonday, accoutred for the fight, even to Alpheus’s
sacred source,” &c. We fancy that we hear the subdued murmuring of the
Minyas discharging its waters into the main the livelong night, and the
hollow sound of the waves breaking on the shore,—until at length we are
cheered at the close of a toilsome march by the gurgling fountains of
Alpheus.
There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest hours,
but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and embodies still all
the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours
can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east
of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the
mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust,
foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death
of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down
to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of
Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in
his rising.
“Homer is gone; and where is Jove? and where
The rival cities seven? His song outlives
Time, tower, and god,—all that then was, save Heaven.”
So too, no doubt, Homer had his Homer, and Orpheus his Orpheus, in the
dim antiquity which preceded them. The mythological system of the
ancients, and it is still the mythology of the moderns, the poem of
mankind, interwoven so wonderfully with their astronomy, and matching
in grandeur and harmony the architecture of the heavens themselves,
seems to point to a time when a mightier genius inhabited the earth.
But, after all, man is the great poet, and not Homer nor Shakespeare;
and our language itself, and the common arts of life, are his work.
Poetry is so universally true and independent of experience, that it
does not need any particular biography to illustrate it, but we refer
it sooner or later to some Orpheus or Linus, and after ages to the
genius of humanity and the gods themselves.
It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the
society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor
fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems,
and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead
of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (τελεία) thoughts to
the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at
least once a day. The whole of the day should not be daytime; there
should be one hour, if no more, which the day did not bring forth.
Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning. But
is it necessary to know what the speculator prints, or the thoughtless
study, or the idle read, the literature of the Russians and the
Chinese, or even French philosophy and much of German criticism. Read
the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
“There are the worshippers with offerings, and the worshippers with
mortifications; and again the worshippers with enthusiastic devotion;
so there are those the wisdom of whose reading is their worship, men of
subdued passions and severe manners;—This world is not for him who doth
not worship; and where, O Arjoon, is there another?” Certainly, we do
not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who
resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than
if he took a nap. The front aspect of great thoughts can only be
enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive. Books, not
which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of
unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would
not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing
institutions,—such call I good books.
All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily
belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries
and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a
thousand disguises. “The way to trade,” as a pedler once told me, “is
to _put it right through_,” no matter what it is, anything that is
agreed on.
“You grov’ling worldlings, you whose wisdom trades
Where light ne’er shot his golden ray.”
By dint of able writing and pen-craft, books are cunningly compiled,
and have their run and success even among the learned, as if they were
the result of a new man’s thinking, and their birth were attended with
some natural throes. But in a little while their covers fall off, for
no binding will avail, and it appears that they are not Books or Bibles
at all. There are new and patented inventions in this shape, purporting
to be for the elevation of the race, which many a pure scholar and
genius who has learned to read is for a moment deceived by, and finds
himself reading a horse-rake, or spinning-jenny, or wooden nutmeg, or
oak-leaf cigar, or steam-power press, or kitchen range, perchance, when
he was seeking serene and biblical truths.
“Merchants, arise,
And mingle conscience with your merchandise.”
Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they
write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat and potatoes,
they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters.
Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise
crops of grain to be distilled into brandy. Books are for the most part
wilfully and hastily written, as parts of a system, to supply a want
real or imagined. Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty
schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not
in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or
rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct
the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors
always dwell.
“To Athens gowned he goes, and from that school
Returns unsped, a more instructed fool.”
They teach the elements really of ignorance, not of knowledge, for, to
speak deliberately and in view of the highest truths, it is not easy to
distinguish elementary knowledge. There is a chasm between knowledge
and ignorance which the arches of science can never span. A book should
contain pure discoveries, glimpses of _terra firma_, though by
shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have
never been out of sight of land. _They_ must not yield wheat and
potatoes, but must themselves be the unconstrained and natural harvest
of their author’s lives.
“What I have learned is mine; I’ve had my thought,
And me the Muses noble truths have taught.”
We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human
books, from frank and honest biographies. The life of a good man will
hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the
inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the
observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of
virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands
sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and
performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the
alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.
At least let us have healthy books, a stout horse-rake or a kitchen
range which is not cracked. Let not the poet shed tears only for the
public weal. He should be as vigorous as a sugar-maple, with sap enough
to maintain his own verdure, beside what runs into the troughs, and not
like a vine, which being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds
to death in the endeavor to heal its wounds. The poet is he that hath
fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He
hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow. We love to think
in winter, as we walk over the snowy pastures, of those happy dreamers
that lie under the sod, of dormice and all that race of dormant
creatures, which have such a superfluity of life enveloped in thick
folds of fur, impervious to cold. Alas, the poet too is, in one sense,
a sort of dormouse gone into winter quarters of deep and serene
thoughts, insensible to surrounding circumstances; his words are the
relation of his oldest and finest memory, a wisdom drawn from the
remotest experience. Other men lead a starved existence, meanwhile,
like hawks, that would fain keep on the wing, and trust to pick up a
sparrow now and then.
There are already essays and poems, the growth of this land, which are
not in vain, all which, however, we could conveniently have stowed in
the till of our chest. If the gods permitted their own inspiration to
be breathed in vain, these might be overlooked in the crowd, but the
accents of truth are as sure to be heard at last on earth as in heaven.
They already seem ancient, and in some measure have lost the traces of
their modern birth. Here are they who
—“ask for that which is our whole life’s light,
For the perpetual, true and clear insight.”
I remember a few sentences which spring like the sward in its native
pasture, where its roots were never disturbed, and not as if spread
over a sandy embankment; answering to the poet’s prayer,
“Let us set so just
A rate on knowledge, that the world may trust
The poet’s sentence, and not still aver
Each art is to itself a flatterer.”
But, above all, in our native port, did we not frequent the peaceful
games of the Lyceum, from which a new era will be dated to New England,
as from the games of Greece. For if Herodotus carried his history to
Olympia to read, after the cestus and the race, have we not heard such
histories recited there, which since our countrymen have read, as made
Greece sometimes to be forgotten?—Philosophy, too, has there her grove
and portico, not wholly unfrequented in these days.
Lately the victor, whom all Pindars praised, has won another palm,
contending with
“Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.”
What earth or sea, mountain or stream, or Muses’ spring or grove, is
safe from his all-searching ardent eye, who drives off Phœbus’ beaten
track, visits unwonted zones, makes the gelid Hyperboreans glow, and
the old polar serpent writhe, and many a Nile flow back and hide his
head!
That Phaeton of our day,
Who’d make another milky way,
And burn the world up with his ray;
By us an undisputed seer,—
Who’d drive his flaming car so near
Unto our shuddering mortal sphere,
Disgracing all our slender worth,
And scorching up the living earth,
To prove his heavenly birth.
The silver spokes, the golden tire,
Are glowing with unwonted fire,
And ever nigher roll and nigher;
The pins and axle melted are,
The silver radii fly afar,
Ah, he will spoil his Father’s car!
Who let him have the steeds he cannot steer?
Henceforth the sun will not shine for a year;
And we shall Ethiops all appear.