THE VALLEY OF THE MERRIMACK.
In the valley of the Merrimack John Greenleaf Whittier was born
(December 17, 1807), and in the same region he has passed nearly his
entire life, first in the town of Haverhill, and then in Amesbury, some
nine miles distant. To strangers, the hilly old county of Essex wears a
somewhat bleak and Scotian look; but it is fertile in poetical
resources, and the tillers of its glebe are passionately attached to its
blue hills and sunken dales, its silver rivers and winding roads,
umbrageous towns and thrifty homes. Like Burns and Cowper, Whittier is
distinctively a rustic poet, and he and Whitman are the most indigenous
and patriotic of our singers. His idyllic poetry savors of the soil and
is full of local allusions. It is, therefore, essential to the full
enjoyment of his writings that one should get, at the outset, as vivid
an idea as possible both of the Essex landscape and the Essex farmer.
Whittier was born some three miles northeast of what is now the thriving
little city of Haverhill. It was settled in 1640 by twelve men from
Newbury and Ipswich. Its Indian name was Pentucket,--the appellation of
a tribe once dwelling on its site, a tribe under the jurisdiction of
Passaconaway, chief of the Pennacooks. The city is built partly on the
river-terrace of the northern shore, and partly on the adjoining hills.
It is celebrated in colonial history for the heroic exploit of Hannah
Duston, who, when taken captive by a party of twenty savages at the time
of the Haverhill massacre, killed and scalped them all, with the aid of
her companion (also a woman), and returned in safety to the settlement.
A handsome monument has recently been erected to her memory in the city
square; it is a granite structure, with bronze bas-reliefs, and
surmounted by a bronze statue of the heroine. In the public library of
the city (founded in 1873) may be seen a fine bust of Whittier, by
Powers. On February 17 and 18, 1882, almost the entire business portion
of the city was destroyed by fire; eight acres were burned over, and
$2,000,000 worth of property destroyed. Haverhill is eighteen miles east
of Lowell, thirty-two miles northwest of Boston, and six miles northeast
of Lawrence. The manufacture of boots and shoes gives employment to
6,000 men. The population in 1870 was 13,092.
Down to the sea, some seventeen miles away, winds the beautiful
Merrimack, with the deep-shaded old town of Newburyport seated at its
mouth. A little more than half way down lies Amesbury, just where the
winding Powwow joins the Merrimack, but not before its nixies and
river-horses have been compelled to put their shoulders to the wheels of
several huge cotton mills that lift their forbidding bulk out of the
very centre of the village. A horse-railroad connects Amesbury with
Newburyport, six miles distant. At about half that distance the road
crosses the Merrimack by way of Deer Island and connecting bridges. The
sole house on this wild, rough island is the home of the Spoffords.
As you near Newburyport, coming down from Amesbury, you see the river
widened into an estuary, and bordered by wide and intensely green
salt-meadows. Numerous large vessels lie at the wharves, a "gundelow,"
with lateen sail, creeps slowly down the current; the draw of the
railroad bridge is perhaps opening for the passage of a tug, and out at
sea athwart the river's mouth--
"Long and low, with dwarf trees crowned,
Plum Island lies, like a whale aground,
A stone's toss over the narrow sound."
_Prophecy of Samuel Sewall._
Far off to the left lie Salisbury and Hampton beaches, celebrated by
Whittier in his poems "Hampton Beach," "Snow-Bound," and "The Tent on
the Beach":--
"Where Salisbury's level marshes spread
Mile-wide as flies the laden bee;
Where merry mowers, hale and strong,
Swept, scythe on scythe, their swaths along
The low green prairies of the sea."
_Snow-Bound._
Standing on the sand-ridge by the beach, you have before you the washing
surf, and miles on miles of level sand, rimmed with creeping, silver
water-lace, overhung here and there by thinnest powdery mist. Out at
sea the waves are tossing their salt-threaded manes, or flinging the
sunlight from their supple coats--(aeonian roar; white-haired, demoniac
shapes)--while at evening you see far away to the northeast the
revolving light of the Isles of Shoals.
"Quail and sandpiper and swallow and sparrow are here;
Sweet sound their manifold notes, high and low, far and near;
Chorus of musical waters, the rush of the breeze,
Steady and strong from the south,--what glad voices are these!"
So sings the poet of the Isles of Shoals, Celia Thaxter, who, it is
said, was discovered and introduced to the world by Whittier,--her rocky
home being still one of his favorite summer resorts.
Landward, your gaze sweeps the beautiful salt-meadows and rests on the
woods beyond, or reaches still farther to the steeples of Newburyport
rising sculpturesquely in the pellucid atmosphere, and often at evening
filling the air with faint silver hymns that chime with the liquid
undertone of the pouring surf.
The valley of the Merrimack with the surrounding region, is, or was
until recently, full of legends of the marvellous and the supernatural,
which, in this remote and isolated corner of the State, have come down
in unbroken tradition from earlier times. One of the distinguishing
peculiarities of Whittier's genius is his story-telling power, and since
he has not only written many poems about the legends of his native
province, but also published in his youth two small collections of those
legends in prose form, it will be proper to give the reader a taste of
them, both here and elsewhere in the volume, and thus assist him to an
understanding of our poet's early environment.
The following extracts from his "Supernaturalism of New England,"
published in the year 1847, are germane to the subject in hand:--
"One of my earliest recollections," he says, "is that of an old
woman residing at Rocks Village, in Haverhill, about two miles from
the place of my nativity, who for many years had borne the
unenviable reputation of a witch. She certainly had the look of
one,--a combination of form, voice, and features, which would have
made the fortune of an English witch-finder in the days of Matthew
Paris or the Sir John Podgers of Dickens, and insured her speedy
conviction in King James' High Court of Justiciary. She was accused
of divers ill-doings, such as preventing the cream in her
neighbor's churn from becoming butter, and snuffing out candles at
huskings and quilting parties. The poor old woman was at length so
sadly annoyed by her unfortunate reputation, that she took the
trouble to go before a Justice of the Peace, and made a solemn oath
that she was a Christian woman and no witch."
* * * * *
"Some forty years ago, on the banks of the pleasant little creek
separating Berwick, in Maine, from Somersworth, in New Hampshire,
within sight of my mother's home, dwelt a plain, sedate member of
the Society of Friends, named Bantum. He passed, throughout a
circle of several miles, as a conjurer and skilful adept in the art
of magic. To him resorted farmers who had lost their cattle,
matrons whose household gear, silver spoons, and table-linen had
been stolen, and young maidens whose lovers were absent; and the
quiet, meek-spirited old man received them all kindly, put on his
huge, iron-rimmed spectacles, opened his 'conjuring book,' which my
mother describes as a large clasped volume, in strange language and
black-letter type, and after due reflection and consideration gave
the required answers without money and without price. The curious
old volume is still in possession of the conjurer's family.
Apparently inconsistent as was this practice of the Black Art with
the simplicity and truthfulness of his religious profession, I have
not been able to learn that he was ever subjected to censure on
account of it."
This incident reminds one of some verses in a poem of Whittier's
entitled "Flowers in Winter":--
"A wizard of the Merrimack--
So old ancestral legends say--
Could call green leaf and blossom back
To frosted stem and spray.
The dry logs of the cottage wall,
Beneath his touch, put out their leaves;
The clay-bound swallow, at his call,
Played round the icy eaves.
The settler saw his oaken flail
Take bud, and bloom before his eyes;
From frozen pools he saw the pale,
Sweet summer lilies rise.
* * * * *
The beechen platter sprouted wild,
The pipkin wore its old-time green;
The cradle o'er the sleeping child
Became a leafy screen."
In chapter second of the "Supernaturalism" we have a whimsical story
about a certain "Aunt Morse," who lived in a town adjoining Amesbury:--
"After the death of Aunt Morse no will was found, though it was
understood before her decease that such a document was in the hands
of Squire S., one of her neighbors. One cold winter evening, some
weeks after her departure, Squire S. sat in his parlor, looking
over his papers, when, hearing some one cough in a familiar way, he
looked up, and saw before him a little crooked old woman, in an
oil-nut colored woollen frock, blue and white tow and linen apron,
and striped blanket, leaning her sharp, pinched face on one hand,
while the other supported a short black tobacco pipe, at which she
was puffing in the most vehement and spiteful manner conceivable.
"The squire was a man of some nerve; but his first thought was to
attempt an escape, from which he was deterred only by the
consideration that any effort to that effect would necessarily
bring him nearer to his unwelcome visitor.
"'Aunt Morse,' he said at length, 'for the Lord's sake, get right
back to the burying-ground! What on earth are you here for?'
"The apparition took her pipe deliberately from her mouth, and
informed him that she came to see justice done with her will; and
that nobody need think of cheating her, dead or alive. Concluding
her remark with a shrill emphasis, she replaced her pipe, and
puffed away with renewed vigor. Upon the squire's promising to obey
her request, she refilled her pipe, which she asked him to light,
and then took her departure."
"Elderly people in this region," says our author, "yet tell
marvellous stories of General M., of Hampton, N. H., especially of
his league with the devil, who used to visit him occasionally in
the shape of a small man in a leathern dress. The general's house
was once burned, in revenge, as it is said, by the fiend, whom the
former had outwitted. He had agreed, it seems, to furnish the
general with a boot full of gold and silver poured annually down
the chimney. The shrewd Yankee cut off, on one occasion, the foot
of the boot, and the devil kept pouring down the coin from the
chimney's top, in a vain attempt to fill it, until the room was
literally packed with the precious metal. When the general died, he
was laid out, and put in a coffin, as usual; but, on the day of the
funeral, it was whispered about that his body was missing; and the
neighbors came to the charitable conclusion that the enemy had got
his own at last."
It should be understood that the state of society which produced such
superstitions and legends as the foregoing lingers now only in secluded
corners of New England. The railroad, the newspaper, and the influx of
foreign population, have combined to frighten away ghost, conjurer, and
witch, or to drive them up into the mountainous districts. There are
still plenty of quaint and picturesque old Puritan farmers; and their
mythology is antique and rusty enough, to be sure. But the folk-lore of
the early days,--where is it? Let the shriek of the steam-demon answer,
or that powerful magician, the "Spirit of the Age," who, ten thousand
times divided, and slyly hidden in plethoric leathern mail bags, daily
rushes into the remotest nooks and corners of the land, there to enter
into the nooks and corners of the mind of man. The "Spirit of the Age"
has exorcised the spirits of the ingle and the forest.