the fall dandelion, a milky way of yellow stars that twinkled as
the wee winds slip through the pasture bars and wander down the
lane. Now, with October at hand, they pale a little at the thought
of coming winter, as the stars do at the approach of dawn, and
here and there is one that is shivering into white pappus, ready
to vanish, ghost like, down the wind. But these are but few; most
of them hold their gold bravely toward the sun still and valiantly
deny that there is anything to be afraid of. The grass is as green
and velvety there as in spring, but the other denizens of this lane
know that winter is coming and show it. The cinnamon and royal
ferns that have come up from the meadow in times past and now
snuggle their roots down between the very stones of the foundation
of the wall, know it, for they have paled to a wan, tan brown, as
delicately beautiful as you shall find on any autumn-tinted tree
of the forest. The woodbine is a deep, rich red, and the poison
ivy that helps it garland the old walls has ripened its leaves to
the loveliest apple reds and yellows that can be found. There are
sweeter-natured things than this poison ivy which beautifies old
walls and fences at this time of year, but nothing that gives us
quite such softly delectable tints of ripeness. It seems as if
these ought to tempt us from the cheek of some rarely palatable
fruit rather than the poisonous leaf of this vixenish vine.
“The wide-spreading pond and the mill that stood by it” have long
since done their work and the mill of Woodworth’s day has passed.
Yet the pond remains in all respects as he knew it, the deep
tangled wildwood lining its one shore, the road and a fringe of
houses skirting the other, and below it another mill, long since
fallen into disuse and decay, for the one that Woodworth recalled
was a product of the century before the last one. Over the stones
of the old dam the water trickles down and meets the salt tides
of the sea, and here at a step the boy of more than a century
ago passed from one country of romance to another. Up stream lie
to-day as they did then the rolling billows of land, fertile
fields, wooded hills and the tangle of swamp and thicket that is,
I believe, more luxuriant in those parts of Plymouth County where
the forest comes down to the sea than in any other place. I have
never found, in tropical jungle or the warmer countries of the
temperate zone, such matted areas of richly growing shrub and vine
as you meet in these Plymouth County bottom lands where the fresh
water comes down to meet the salt. Fox grapes luxuriate there and
woodbine and convolvulus climb and twine, but the toughest of the
tangle is due to the greenbrier, to penetrate which one needs to
use a machete as much as ever Cuban did in Camaguay. The greenbrier
is tough and its thorns repellent, yet its glossy smilax leaves
are beautifully decorative and its close-set bunches of deep blue
fruit, now ripe, please the eye if not the palate. Thickets like
these border the pasture paths in this rich bottom land walling
in the wanderer with high tapestried walls of vivid green, richly
patterned with varied leaves and flowers the long summer through.
Somewhere there may be a more beautiful country than such pasture
land. Wandering far I have failed to find it.
When the east wind blows in on this lovely country of pasture,
field and woodland it brings the roar of the sea and the smell of
it. The breakers that smash against the boulder-strewn base of
Third Cliff send the call of the wide spaces of the earth into the
secluded glades, and match the lure of their odors against the
fragrance of the woods. And here between the two lies the level
stretch of the salt marsh, the no-man’s land, the Tom Tiddler’s
ground, which the sea may seize but never quite possess, which the
country may invade but never overrun. The marsh is a little border
world of itself, with its own plants, its own birds, even its
own air. It infuses into the cool rich breath of the sea a tonic
fragrance of its own, and there is a rich harmony in the coloring
of its wide levels that more than matches any beauty that the land
or the sea has to give. Colors drawn from the weeds of the deep sea
caves and the clear depths of cool brine, olives and browns and
greens, keen grays and soft blues, are in the marsh, shaded and
toned to an individuality of their own, as tonic to the eye as its
ozonic odors are to the sense of smell.
Through these comes the full tide twice a day, bringing the salt,
cool tang of its kisses to the feet of the old dam, there to meet
those of the stream brought far from cool springs in the hills and
daily perfumed with the petals of some newly ripened wild flower,
caltha in the spring, wild rose in the summer, clematis now, with
aster and witch hazel still to come. No wonder “the wide-spreading
pond and the mill that stood by it; the bridge and the rock
where the cataract fell,” were strongly fixed on the memory of
one who had in boyhood been familiar with these scenes. The farm
of his ancestors may not have held these by deed, nor the level
wonder of the marsh, and the blue reaches of the sea beyond, but
it held them, nevertheless, and the man that owned the one had
an inalienable right to the other. Nor need the passer in this
unspoiled, half-forgotten corner of Pilgrim land be without them,
though he merely rent a room by the day or come with staff and
scrip for but an afternoon.
[Illustration: “The water from the old well cooled the throat
of his memory and sparkled to the eye of it as he recalled the
dripping bucket.”]
It was about these, too, that “The Old Oaken Bucket” was written,
though the words of the poem do not say so, nor, I fancy, did the
author realize it. The water from the old well cooled the throat
of his memory with these and sparkled with them to the eye of it
as he recalled the dripping bucket. Without the background there
were no picture, however we forget it in the vivid figures in the
foreground. The background of Woodworth’s picture remains much as
he left it when, a boy in his teens, he started for Boston to make
the fortune he was later to find in New York. Of the figures he
painted in the immediate foreground, some remain vivid still, after
the lapse of a century. It is not so with the orchard. The great
trees that still bear good fruit that they toss over into the lane
up by the old barn are vigorous in an old age that might well seem
to go back and include the beginning of the nineteenth century, but
it does not. The trees were planted since the poet’s day. One tree
only of the orchard he knew remains. That stands just within the
wall at the road, a stone’s toss from the well, bearing on its
topmost growth old-fashioned russets. But this tree was top-grafted
some time in the early years of the last century. Before that it
was of a now forgotten variety known to our great-grandfathers as
“high top.” Of late sprouts from below the graft on this old tree
have come to maturity, and the visitor to the place may taste the
same apples, with their sweet and pleasant flavor, that pleased the
palate of the poet a century and more ago.
The old oaken bucket itself has passed and been replaced many a
time since Woodworth’s day; the wooden well-curb and the sweep,
swinging in the upright crotch, have come and gone and come again.
Curb and bucket and sweep are there to-day, similar in form and
appearance no doubt and equally useful for the drawing of water,
as near like those of which the poet wrote as is the water of
to-day like that of his time. Even at the well itself the lapse of
a century has left but one thing permanent. That is the cylinder
of stone that walls it in. Here again, as in the walls surrounding
the ancient fields, the stones that were the ball-bearings of
the glacier serve as the enduring monument of the pioneer. And in
these we have the most lasting one that he could raise to himself.
In the passing of enough centuries the slow heaving of frost and
subsidence of thaw may throw out of alignment the carefully laid
old stone walls. Nature herself in her own good time will throw
down and scatter these tables of stone in which the early settlers
wrote their laws of the fields. New owners will change those laws
and use the stones for the foundations of other enterprises and
thus in time will pass these monuments to the memories of the
earliest occupants. It is not so with the old wells. They may
fall into disuse, be covered over and filled in and forgotten.
But the carefully laid cylinders of stone that enclosed them will
remain out of reach of frost, untouched by man through indefinite
centuries. Thirty, fifty, in some instances sixty and more feet
beneath the surface they lie, and the man of a thousand years hence
will find these memorials of early occupancy intact if he will
but dig in the right place for them. The old well is the first
settler’s most enduring monument. I fancy the poem will outlast
that, not for its singing quality which early caused it to be set
to music that has lived along with the words, though that might
well justify a green old age; not for its beauty of diction or its
purity of thought, but because it voices a sentiment that the whole
of humanity understands and approves. None so proud and none so
mean but he knows the taste of that draught of cool water and the
gratitude it inspires. To lean over the curb of the pioneer’s well
is to see your own face reflected as if with that of all mankind
in a little circle that is the counterpart of the sky overhead.
And out of the blue depths shines the gratitude of all mankind for
thirst well quenched. Adam, or whatever the first man was called,
thus gave thanks on his knees for a first draught from some clear
spring and saw the sky reflected as he did so. Even the thoughts
which “Home, Sweet Home” inspires do not go quite so far back to
the beginnings of the race, nor is that song any more likely to
live to remote times than is “The Old Oaken Bucket.”
IX
IN OLD NEWBURYPORT
_The Dignity, Quiet, and Beauty of the One-Time Busy Seaport_
Salt marshes surround Newburyport with their level beauty and
through them you must come to it. Through them, too, the sea comes
to it, stretching long arms lovingly as if to clasp it and bear
it away. Thus fondly but placidly the tides twice a day give the
gentle old city a hug and then go about their business. It is no
wonder that this corner of old Newbury knew it belonged to the
ocean rather than to the land and was set off as a seaport long
ago. In the heyday of their affection the town sent forth its
splendid ships in great numbers to all seas, and the seas in return
sent tribute of all distant climes to Newburyport. For more than
a century shipmasters and sailors born on the long ridge south of
the Merrimac knew Guadeloupe and Surinam, Port au Prince and St.
Martins as well as they knew the streets of their own towns, for
the trade with the West Indies was very large. Ships launched at
Newburyport and manned by her men brought back wine from Madeira,
carpeting, silks and glassware from Bilbao, salt from Cadiz and
from Turk’s Island, linen from Ireland, earthenware from Dunkirk.
They brought back, too, knowledge of the wide spaces of the earth
and distant cities, and it is no wonder the town grew in dignity as
well as wealth, for it had a broad outlook upon the world. In the
year 1810, more than a century ago, twenty-one full-rigged ships,
thirteen brigs and a schooner were built and set sail on maiden
voyages from Newburyport. On the first day of May, ten years later,
forty vessels that had been held in port by contrary winds put to
sea. The thought of such fleets makes the harbor lonely to-day when
the only masts in sight are those of a coal barge or two, waiting
for the surf on the bar to go down and let them out.
It is only a little over half a century since Newburyport saw the
launching of a ship that was famous on all seas, her exploits
woven into sea chanteys and ringing in hoarse chorus round the
capstan in many a distant port while the men bent to the capstan
bars, the pawl clicked, and ponderous anchors strained upward
out of the ooze. That was the clipper-built Liverpool packet
Dreadnaught. She was known as “The Wild Boat of the Atlantic” and
“The Flying Dutchman.” Twice she carried the latest American news
to Europe, slipping in between steamers. Once in 1860 she crossed
the wind-swept western ocean in nine days and thirteen hours,
from Sandy Hook to Queenstown, a pace which many an ocean-going
steamship does not better to-day. She was conspicuous on all seas
for the red cross painted on her foretopsail. “The Port” was proud
indeed of this vessel, and as I stood on the top deck of the gray
old custom house, looking down on the empty harbor on the one hand
and up the ridge at the great square houses of the old sea captains
and ship-builders on the other, I thought the wind crooned a snatch
or two of deep sea chantey in memory of it round the gray stone
cornices at my feet:
“There’s a saucy, wild packet, a packet of fame,
She belongs to New York and the Dreadnaught’s her name.
She’s bound to the eastward where stormy winds blow,
Bound away in the Dreadnaught to the eastward we go.
Oh, the Dreadnaught’s a-howling down the Long Island shore,
Captain Samuels will drive her as he’s oft done before,
With every stitch drawing aloft and alow,
She’s a Liverpool packet; Lord God, see her go!”
Such was the building of Newburyport, and such is the romance of
memory that comes in to her on every wind of the sea to-day, though
the ships have sailed away never to return and even the foundations
of the old ship yards are hard to find. The wealth and dignity of
the old sea-faring days remain. The custom house bravely hoists its
flag each morning and waits in gray silence for the cargoes that
rarely come. Old age comes to it, though, and to climb the worn
stairs to its top is to walk with the men of other years, hearing
their footfalls in the echo of your own and seeing them vanish,
phantoms of gray dust, through dark doorways into the forgotten
past. Piled in the corners as they pass you see the outworn flags
of other years, as if draping huddled heaps of the achievements of
these phantom shipmasters. Perhaps in some dark corner lies another
story like that of the Scarlet Letter.
Along the street on which the custom house faces passed the
sea-faring traffic of the day, and the buildings suggest Wapping
Old Stairs or some such quaint corner of old London near the
Thames. The smell of the sea lingers round all corners, and in
the little shop windows are crowded for sale pictures of ships
and fragments of ship chandlery and curios from ports once a
half-year’s sail away; wares that one fancies have waited a century
for customers. The street itself loves the sea so well that it is
always trying to reach it, swerving toward the water line often
and making detours when blocked, and always sending down little
messenger side streets to bring it news from the very shore, thus
winding its way always eastward till it gets an unobstructed view
of the harbor entrance across Joppa flats and is no doubt content,
strolling there along the very margin with a blear eye turned
seaward for the ships that come no more.
In the debris the centuries have dropped along this once busy
street the quaint and curious mingling of useless utilities and
unvalued treasures, one is reminded of the quaint and curious
characters such surroundings seem to evolve. Among such Dickens
finds an Old Curiosity Shop and its keeper and makes them immortal.
Yet it is not often that the queer character himself goes into
print and leaves his name and pokes his personality into the
dusty corners of literary fame, to be picked out and wondered at
centuries after. Newburyport had one such, the story of whose
amazing eccentricities still lasts, linked with the dignified
reputation of the old seaport. These stories in time may be
forgotten, though they have lasted more than a century, but his
astounding book, “Pickles for the Knowing Ones,” bids fair to
last far longer, as long in fact as libraries collect and hold
absurdities of print as well as literature. It is one of the
ironies of fame that Newburyport, which can rightfully boast of
being the town in which William Lloyd Garrison established his
Free Press and wrote his anti-slavery broadsides, the town where
Whittier’s first poem was published, where Whitefield preached
and John Pierpont wrote the best of his patriotic verse, where
Richard Hildreth began his work as a historian, where many another
author of good repute was born, or lived, or died, where Harriet
Prescott Spofford still lives and adds to her literary fame, should
recall to the minds of many of us only the name of the preposterous
“Lord” Timothy Dexter. After all, perhaps it is style alone which
survives. Dexter’s style was like nothing which ever went before
or has yet come after, in print. It takes an inventive mind to
find any meaning at all in what he wrote, sense being as scarce as
punctuation, of which there was none. Yet the trail of Lord Timothy
Dexter is still eagerly followed through Newburyport annals by
people who forget that John Pierpont ever lived, and we all gloat
over the punctuation marks added in a solid page at the end of his
second edition, to be used as the reader’s fancy dictates.
Lord Dexter lived in the solid, dignified upper portion of the
town. His mind and character belonged in the queer junk in the
little shop windows down near the water front. I can fancy John
Pierpont drawing the clear, denunciatory fire of his verses from
the keen sea winds that blow on the top of the ridge where High
Street is lined with the noble, square, stately old houses of
the one-time magnates of the place. It is not a far cry from the
shacks of Joppa and the clutter shops of the lower regions to
this atmosphere of worth and dignity along the higher levels of
Newburyport. I have an idea that more than one youth who climbed
first to reef topsails later climbed to a master’s berth and an
owner’s financial security, his abode climbing with him from the
jumbled, characterless houses of the lower regions to one of these
mansions in the skies: It may be that there is equal opportunity
now, but it is not so easy to see. Sea-faring and shipbuilding
could not make men, but it did train them to wide outlooks and
large experience in self-control and self-reliance; larger, I
believe, than do the shoe factories and other industries that have
taken their places in this town that the sea once made its own.
Newburyport does not grow in population, but it holds its own with
a peaceful dignity and a quiet beauty that seem to belong to it as
much as do its surrounding marshes. Leisure, peace, and an assured
prosperity seem to mark the one as well as the other, whether ships
come or go. There is little bustle, even at its busiest points,
and you have but to go a little way from these to find as sweet a
country as any part of New England has to offer. Passing up the
river bank where the marsh grasses grow over the rotting stocks
of the old shipyards, you find the hills coming down to meet the
marshes and mingling with them in friendly converse. The town drops
behind you, and gentle hillocks offer kindly asylum on the placid
levels of the river bank, beauty spots full of half-wild life.
[Illustration: The Newburyport home of Joshua Coffin, the early
friend and teacher of Whittier]
Here and there on these is an apple tree that has strolled down
from suburban orchards as if to view the beauty of the river, and
liked the place so well that it stayed, glad to escape the humdrum
of ordered life, sending out wild shoots at will and producing
fruit that has a half-wild vigor of flavor that puts the orchard
apples to shame for their insipidity. They riot in lawless growth,
these runaway trees, and welcome their boon companions, crows and
jays, spreading an autumnal feast for their delectation and
holding the fragments far into the winter that none may go away
from a visit hungry. The pasture cedars, that love the river air,
but may not live on the marsh, have built seaside colonies on
these hillocks and spread a feast of blue cedar berries for all
passing flocks. Here the robins, now gathering for their winter
flight south, flock and feed, holding their ground at the approach
of man, crying “Tut, tut!” to his intrusion. With them are the
cedar wax-wings, also very fond of the cedar berries, the soft
gray-browns of the bird’s plumage blending most pleasantly with
the olive greens of the cedars. There is a dainty, sleek beauty
about this bird that harmonizes wonderfully well with the cedar
trees which it frequents, and the little red sealing-wax tips
on its wing feathers make one think that the flock is bringing
Christmas decorations of holly berries to each tree to deck it for
the holiday season. In wild apple trees the robins seem less than
half-wild and in the cedars the wax-wings more than half-tame. The
two give a friendly spirit to the spot and at once make you feel
that you are welcome. To sit quietly in such a place for five
minutes is to make it your own home, and you go away with regret
and a certain homesickness. Huckleberry bushes, maples, beach plums
and birches stand admiringly round, and wild grasses and pasture
flowers crowd in and add to the cosiness.
Of these wild flowers the seaside goldenrod is most profuse.
Pasture-born like the cedars, it too loves the sea and crowds to
its very edge like the people at Revere and Nantasket, so close
indeed that at high tides the smelt and young herring, swimming in
silver shoals, nibble at the bare toes the plants dabble in the
water. You may know this even if you do not see the nibblers, for
the plants quiver and shake with suppressed laughter at being thus
tickled. The seaside goldenrod is prettier now in the cool winds
and under the pale October sun’s slant rays than it was in the
heyday of August, when it burgeoned with yellow racemes of rather
coarse bloom. Its head-gear is in the full autumn style, and it
bows beneath the weight of ostrich-plume pappus and softens all the
foreground of the view with gray fluff.
From these sea margins where tide and river mingle and meet the
borders of Newburyport one gets glimpses of higher hills up-river,
dark with pines and gorgeous with autumn scarlet and gold, and
among them the picturesque towers and cadenced sweep of the old
chain bridge that takes you across the river to Amesbury. Down
river to the old chain bridge the rough rocks of the New Hampshire
hills, wandering far, come to get a taste of salt, and put their
lips to the water at the island home of Harriet Prescott Spofford,
whose sparkling verse and piquant prose has made the name of
Newburyport known in literary annals for more than half a century.
Hills and sea meet there, and all the beauty of marsh, pasture and
woodland surround the spot. It is no wonder that romance, vivid
life and rich atmosphere inform her work.
[Illustration: “Down river to the old chain bridge the rough rocks
of the New Hampshire hills come to get a taste of salt.”
_See page 129_ ]