The traveller in western Massachusetts, reaching some quiet village upon
the hills, which seems to him singularly lonely and remote, often finds
some little incident in its annals which connects it with the great
world. Coming to Goshen, a solitary little town wholly unknown to most
of our readers, he is conscious of the height, of the purity of the air,
and the peacefulness of the wooded landscape, and far below, towards the
east, he sees the undulating line of Holyoke, and on some fortunate day
may catch the gleam of the placid Connecticut winding through broad
meadows and between Tom and Holyoke to the Sound.
The little town itself is a grassy street, with a meeting-house and a
hotel, which has a desolate air of mistaken enterprise declining into
disappointment, with long anticipation of a crowd of summer pilgrims,
who might well turn their steps hither, but who have never come. Beyond
the village street upon the same plateau is the great Goshen reservoir,
which lies hushed in grim repose over the town of Williamsburg, a few
miles below, the town which was overwhelmed some years ago by the
bursting of the Mill River dam. Such events are the tragedies of the
hills, which become traditions told in the village store, and investing
with dignity, as the years pass, the villagers who recall the direful
day.
Among the traditions of Goshen is that of the passage of some of the
soldiers of Burgoyne on their march from Saratoga to Cambridge. When the
brilliant British general swept down Lake Champlain to the Hudson,
capturing Ticonderoga as he came, it was feared in these hills that he
would march triumphantly from Albany to Boston. There was a general
rally of all able-bodied men to the rescue; and as they marched away
from their fields ripe for the harvest the prospect was dismal, until
the able-bodied women marched into the fields and gathered and housed
the crops. The British invaders reached Goshen, indeed, on their march
from Albany to Boston, but only as prisoners of war.
All this peaceful neighborhood was originally granted by the State to
the heirs of soldiers in the early New England wars. Goshen and its
neighbor Chesterfield, another city set upon a hill six or seven miles
to the south, were grants to the descendants of soldiers in the
Narragansett expedition of King Philip's war. From Goshen the
Chesterfield meeting-house can be seen against the southern horizon, and
the road lies through high pastures and lonely farms to the pleasant
town. When you climb its hill and look around, you see a cluster of
hospitable houses, around which the neatly kept grounds give an air of
refinement to the whole village, which is steeped in rural tranquillity.
The broad hills slope westward towards the valley of the Westfield, and
beyond lie the shaggy sides of the Cummington range. Chesterfield has
its special tradition of Lafayette passing the night in its old tavern,
on his way from Albany to Boston, in 1824. It is a characteristic
representative of the hill towns, so still that the air seems drowsy as
in Rip Van Winkle's village. But such tranquil towns, in which a moving
figure is half spectral and almost a surprise, were the beginnings of
the nation. From these sequestered springs the mighty river flows.
Chesterfield has not half the population that it counted seventy years
ago. The whole town now reports scarcely seven hundred persons. Yet,
with all the old spirit, it invited its neighbors in Hampshire County to
come and dine on one of the loveliest of summer days this year. It was
the annual festival of the Hill-side Agricultural Society, and fully a
thousand people filled the friendly town. The feast was spread upon
tables on a green space beside the old house in which Lafayette slept,
and under a bower of leafy white birch boughs. The magnates of the
county were all present, and it was whispered privately that there were
private whisperings among eminent politicians, who, however, with the
non-political, or the political of the wrong side, talked cheerfully of
the charming day and the promising crops. Politics is the breath of our
patriotic nostrils, and it was a stimulating thought that while we were
listening to the humorous but well-merited praises of Strawberry Hill
pork, some of our bland companions were saving their bacon in other
ways; and while we dreamed of crisp sausages and savory ham, were
contriving Senators and Councillors, and even a Governor himself.
The simple courtesy and universal intelligence were of the old New
England, nor less so the composure and ease with which speaker after
speaker mounted the bench on which he sat, and in what he said, and the
way in which he said it, showed that he was a graduate of the town
meeting. The pastor of Goshen, asked to speak of some of the more noted
citizens of the neighboring towns, might well have occupied with so
fruitful a text all the hours until sunset. But with exemplary
discretion he mentioned but a few, and among them some that surprised a
New-Yorker, who had not known, but might have guessed, that Gideon Lee,
former Mayor of the city, and Luther Bradish, Lieutenant-Governor of the
State, came from the little town upon the Cummington hills opposite,
where Bryant studied law.
The whole region before us, indeed, was especially Bryant's. Upon the
slope yonder he was born, and we could see the house in which as a boy
he lived. "Thanatopsis" was the hymn of his meditations among those
solitary woods. There, upon the nearer hill, high over Plainfield, where
he wrote the poem the "Water-fowl," forever floating in the twilight
heavens--
"Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way."
We were looking upon the cradle of American literature. Here its first
enduring poem was written. The poet himself never escaped the spell of
the hills. The child was father of the man. Bryant in the city was
always the grave and unchanged genius of New England. The city did not
wear off the rusticity of his manner. His air was reserved and remote,
and he was still wrapped in the seclusion of the hills. It is in such
scenes and among such people on such a day that the power of these hills
and their influence upon our national life and literature are perceived.
These hidden springs have overflowed the prairies of the West; and how
much of the wealth and prosperity, the energy, industry, and
enlightenment of New York have trickled down from them, you may hear, if
you doubt, every year on Forefathers' Day at the New England dinner in
New Amsterdam. As there is altogether too much glory to be adequately
celebrated in one day, another has been added, to accommodate the Yankee
city of Brooklyn, and it is not the fault of the sons of New England if
on those two days the whole continent does not hear the melodious
thunder of their eloquence proclaiming that New England always led, is
leading still, and will lead forever, the triumphal procession of
American progress.
Supported by such a history it is a natural boast. There is, however,
one inexorable condition. To do what New England has done, New England
must be what she has been.