When we awoke this morning, we heard the faint, deliberate, and ominous
sound of rain-drops on our cotton roof. The rain had pattered all
night, and now the whole country wept, the drops falling in the river,
and on the alders, and in the pastures, and instead of any bow in the
heavens, there was the trill of the hair-bird all the morning. The
cheery faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole
woodland choir beside. When we first stepped abroad, a flock of sheep,
led by their rams, came rushing down a ravine in our rear, with
heedless haste and unreserved frisking, as if unobserved by man, from
some higher pasture where they had spent the night, to taste the
herbage by the river-side; but when their leaders caught sight of our
white tent through the mist, struck with sudden astonishment, with
their fore-feet braced, they sustained the rushing torrent in their
rear, and the whole flock stood stock-still, endeavoring to solve the
mystery in their sheepish brains. At length, concluding that it boded
no mischief to them, they spread themselves out quietly over the field.
We learned afterward that we had pitched our tent on the very spot
which a few summers before had been occupied by a party of Penobscots.
We could see rising before us through the mist a dark conical eminence
called Hooksett Pinnacle, a landmark to boatmen, and also Uncannunuc
Mountain, broad off on the west side of the river.
This was the limit of our voyage, for a few hours more in the rain
would have taken us to the last of the locks, and our boat was too
heavy to be dragged around the long and numerous rapids which would
occur. On foot, however, we continued up along the bank, feeling our
way with a stick through the showery and foggy day, and climbing over
the slippery logs in our path with as much pleasure and buoyancy as in
brightest sunshine; scenting the fragrance of the pines and the wet
clay under our feet, and cheered by the tones of invisible waterfalls;
with visions of toadstools, and wandering frogs, and festoons of moss
hanging from the spruce-trees, and thrushes flitting silent under the
leaves; our road still holding together through that wettest of
weather, like faith, while we confidently followed its lead. We managed
to keep our thoughts dry, however, and only our clothes were wet. It
was altogether a cloudy and drizzling day, with occasional brightenings
in the mist, when the trill of the tree-sparrow seemed to be ushering
in sunny hours.
“Nothing that naturally happens to man can _hurt_ him, earthquakes and
thunder-storms not excepted,” said a man of genius, who at this time
lived a few miles farther on our road. When compelled by a shower to
take shelter under a tree, we may improve that opportunity for a more
minute inspection of some of Nature’s works. I have stood under a tree
in the woods half a day at a time, during a heavy rain in the summer,
and yet employed myself happily and profitably there prying with
microscopic eye into the crevices of the bark or the leaves or the
fungi at my feet. “Riches are the attendants of the miser; and the
heavens rain plenteously upon the mountains.” I can fancy that it would
be a luxury to stand up to one’s chin in some retired swamp a whole
summer day, scenting the wild honeysuckle and bilberry blows, and
lulled by the minstrelsy of gnats and mosquitoes! A day passed in the
society of those Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of
Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry
vines, and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds. Say twelve hours of
genial and familiar converse with the leopard frog; the sun to rise
behind alder and dogwood, and climb buoyantly to his meridian of two
hands’ breadth, and finally sink to rest behind some bold western
hummock. To hear the evening chant of the mosquito from a thousand
green chapels, and the bittern begin to boom from some concealed fort
like a sunset gun!—Surely one may as profitably be soaked in the juices
of a swamp for one day as pick his way dry-shod over sand. Cold and
damp,—are they not as rich experience as warmth and dryness?
At present, the drops come trickling down the stubble while we lie
drenched on a bed of withered wild oats, by the side of a bushy hill,
and the gathering in of the clouds, with the last rush and dying breath
of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the
country over, enhance the sense of inward comfort and sociableness. The
birds draw closer and are more familiar under the thick foliage,
seemingly composing new strains upon their roosts against the sunshine.
What were the amusements of the drawing-room and the library in
comparison, if we had them here? We should still sing as of old,—
My books I’d fain cast off, I cannot read,
’Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,
And will not mind to hit their proper targe.
Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,
Our Shakespeare’s life were rich to live again,
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,
Nor Shakespeare’s books, unless his books were men.
Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
Between the ants upon this hummock’s crown?
Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,
If red or black the gods will favor most,
Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,
Struggling to heave some rock against the host.
Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour,
For now I’ve business with this drop of dew,
And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower,—
I’ll meet him shortly when the sky is blue.
This bed of herd’s-grass and wild oats was spread
Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use,
A clover tuft is pillow for my head,
And violets quite overtop my shoes.
And now the cordial clouds have shut all in
And gently swells the wind to say all’s well
The scattered drops are falling fast and thin,
Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.
I am well drenched upon my bed of oats;
But see that globe come rolling down its stem
Now like a lonely planet there it floats,
And now it sinks into my garment’s hem.
Drip drip the trees for all the country round,
And richness rare distils from every bough,
The wind alone it is makes every sound,
Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.
For shame the sun will never show himself,
Who could not with his beams e’er melt me so,
My dripping locks,—they would become an elf,
Who in a beaded coat does gayly go.
The Pinnacle is a small wooded hill which rises very abruptly to the
height of about two hundred feet, near the shore at Hooksett Falls. As
Uncannunuc Mountain is perhaps the best point from which to view the
valley of the Merrimack, so this hill affords the best view of the
river itself. I have sat upon its summit, a precipitous rock only a few
rods long, in fairer weather, when the sun was setting and filling the
river valley with a flood of light. You can see up and down the
Merrimack several miles each way. The broad and straight river, full of
light and life, with its sparkling and foaming falls, the islet which
divides the stream, the village of Hooksett on the shore almost
directly under your feet, so near that you can converse with its
inhabitants or throw a stone into its yards, the woodland lake at its
western base, and the mountains in the north and northeast, make a
scene of rare beauty and completeness, which the traveller should take
pains to behold.
We were hospitably entertained in Concord, New Hampshire, which we
persisted in calling _New_ Concord, as we had been wont, to distinguish
it from our native town, from which we had been told that it was named
and in part originally settled. This would have been the proper place
to conclude our voyage, uniting Concord with Concord by these
meandering rivers, but our boat was moored some miles below its port.
The richness of the intervals at Penacook, now Concord, New Hampshire,
had been observed by explorers, and, according to the historian of
Haverhill, in the
“year 1726, considerable progress was made in the settlement, and a
road was cut through the wilderness from Haverhill to Penacook. In the
fall of 1727, the first family, that of Captain Ebenezer Eastman, moved
into the place. His team was driven by Jacob Shute, who was by birth a
Frenchman, and he is said to have been the first person who drove a
team through the wilderness. Soon after, says tradition, one Ayer, a
lad of 18, drove a team consisting of ten yoke of oxen to Penacook,
swam the river, and ploughed a portion of the interval. He is supposed
to have been the first person who ploughed land in that place. After he
had completed his work, he started on his return at sunrise, drowned a
yoke of oxen while recrossing the river, and arrived at Haverhill about
midnight. The crank of the first saw-mill was manufactured in
Haverhill, and carried to Penacook on a horse.”
But we found that the frontiers were not this way any longer. This
generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises.
Go where we will on the _surface_ of things, men have been there before
us. We cannot now have the pleasure of erecting the _last_ house; that
was long ago set up in the suburbs of Astoria City, and our boundaries
have literally been run to the South Sea, according to the old patents.
But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range,
are still as shallow as ever. Undoubtedly, as a Western orator said,
“Men generally live over about the same surface; some live long and
narrow, and others live broad and short”; but it is all superficial
living. A worm is as good a traveller as a grasshopper or a cricket,
and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away
from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing
before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm
escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. The frontiers
are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man _fronts_ a
fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled
wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or,
farther still, between him and _it_. Let him build himself a log-house
with the bark on where he is, _fronting_ IT, and wage there an Old
French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or
whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp
if he can.
We now no longer sailed or floated on the river, but trod the
unyielding land like pilgrims. Sadi tells who may travel; among others,
“A common mechanic, who can earn a subsistence by the industry of his
hand, and shall not have to stake his reputation for every morsel of
bread, as philosophers have said.” He may travel who can subsist on the
wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country. A man may travel
fast enough and earn his living on the road. I have at times been
applied to to do work when on a journey; to do tinkering and repair
clocks, when I had a knapsack on my back. A man once applied to me to
go into a factory, stating conditions and wages, observing that I
succeeded in shutting the window of a railroad car in which we were
travelling, when the other passengers had failed. “Hast thou not heard
of a Sufi, who was hammering some nails into the sole of his sandal; an
officer of cavalry took him by the sleeve, saying, Come along and shoe
my horse.” Farmers have asked me to assist them in haying, when I was
passing their fields. A man once applied to me to mend his umbrella,
taking me for an umbrella-mender, because, being on a journey, I
carried an umbrella in my hand while the sun shone. Another wished to
buy a tin cup of me, observing that I had one strapped to my belt, and
a sauce-pan on my back. The cheapest way to travel, and the way to
travel the farthest in the shortest distance, is to go afoot, carrying
a dipper, a spoon, and a fish-line, some Indian meal, some salt, and
some sugar. When you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and
cook them; or you can boil a hasty-pudding; or you can buy a loaf of
bread at a farmer’s house for fourpence, moisten it in the next brook
that crosses the road, and dip into it your sugar,—this alone will last
you a whole day;—or, if you are accustomed to heartier living, you can
buy a quart of milk for two cents, crumb your bread or cold pudding
into it, and eat it with your own spoon out of your own dish. Any one
of these things I mean, not all together. I have travelled thus some
hundreds of miles without taking any meal in a house, sleeping on the
ground when convenient, and found it cheaper, and in many respects more
profitable, than staying at home. So that some have inquired why it
would not be best to travel always. But I never thought of travelling
simply as a means of getting a livelihood. A simple woman down in
Tyngsborough, at whose house I once stopped to get a draught of water,
when I said, recognizing the bucket, that I had stopped there nine
years before for the same purpose, asked if I was not a traveller,
supposing that I had been travelling ever since, and had now come round
again; that travelling was one of the professions, more or less
productive, which her husband did not follow. But continued travelling
is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the
shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean
up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that
the after-life of those who have travelled much is very pathetic. True
and sincere travelling is no pastime, but it is as serious as the
grave, or any part of the human journey, and it requires a long
probation to be broken into it. I do not speak of those that travel
sitting, the sedentary travellers whose legs hang dangling the while,
mere idle symbols of the fact, any more than when we speak of sitting
hens we mean those that sit standing, but I mean those to whom
travelling is life for the legs, and death too, at last. The traveller
must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements,
the principal powers that be for him. He shall experience at last that
old threat of his mother fulfilled, that he shall be skinned alive. His
sores shall gradually deepen themselves that they may heal inwardly,
while he gives no rest to the sole of his foot, and at night weariness
must be his pillow, that so he may acquire experience against his rainy
days.—So was it with us.
Sometimes we lodged at an inn in the woods, where trout-fishers from
distant cities had arrived before us, and where, to our astonishment,
the settlers dropped in at nightfall to have a chat and hear the news,
though there was but one road, and no other house was visible,—as if
they had come out of the earth. There we sometimes read old newspapers,
who never before read new ones, and in the rustle of their leaves heard
the dashing of the surf along the Atlantic shore, instead of the sough
of the wind among the pines. But then walking had given us an appetite
even for the least palatable and nutritious food.
Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it
impossible to read at home, but for which you have still a lingering
regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey. At a country inn,
in the barren society of ostlers and travellers, I could undertake the
writers of the silver or the brazen age with confidence. Almost the
last regular service which I performed in the cause of literature was
to read the works of