THE BRIDAL OF PENNACOOK."
WE had been wandering for many days Through the rough northern country. The sunset, with its bars of purple cloud, Like a new heaven, shine upward from the lake Of Winnepiseogee; and had felt
The sunrise breezes, midst the leafy isles
Which stoop their summer beauty to the lips Of the bright waters. We had checked our steeds, Silent with wonder, where the mountain wall
Is piled to heaven; and, through the narrow rift Of the vast rocks, against whose rugged feet Beats the mad torrent with perpetual roar, Where noonday is as twilight, and the wind Comes burdened with the everlasting moan Of forests and of far-off water-falls,
We had looked upward where the summer sky, Tasseled with clouds light-woven by the sun,
*Winnepurkit, otherwise called George, Sachem of Saugus, married a daughter of Passaconaway, the great Pennacook chieftain, in 1662. The wedding took place at Pennacook (now Concord, N. H.), and the ceremonies closed with a great feast. According to the usages of the chiefs, Passaconaway ordered a select number of his men to accompany the newly-married couple to the dwelling of the husband, where in turn there was another great feast. Some time after, the wife of Winnepurkit expressing a desire to visit her father's house, was permitted to go accompanied by a brave escort of her husband's chief men. But when she wished to return, her father sent a messenger to Saugus, informing her husband, and asking him to come and take her away. He returned for answer that he had escorted his wife to her father's house in a style that became a chief, and that now if she wished to return, her father must send her back in the same way. This Passaconaway refused to do, and it is said that here terminated the connection of his daughter with the Saugus chief.- Vide Morton's New Canaan.
Sprung its blue arch above the abutting crags O'er-roofing the vast portal of the land. Beyond the wall of mountains. We had passed The high source of the Saco; and, bewildered In the dwarf spruce-belts of the Crystal Hills Had heard above us, like a voice in the cloud, The horn of Fabyan sounding; and atop Of old Agioochook had seen the mountains
Piled to the northward, shagged with wood, and thick As meadow mole hills the far sea of Casco,
A white gleam on the horizon of the east; Fair lakes, embosomed in the woods and hills; Moosehillock's mountain range, and Kearsarge Lifting his Titan forehead to the sun!
And we had rested underneath the oaks
Shadowing the bank, whose grassy spires are shaken By the perpetual beating of the falls
Of the wild Ammonoosuc. We had tracked
The winding Pemigewasset, overhung
By beechen shadows, whitening down its rocks, Or lazily gliding through its intervals, From waving rye-fields sending up the gleam Of sunlit waters. We had seen the moon Rising behind Umbagog's eastern pines Like a great Indian camp-fire; and its beams At midnight spanning with a bridge of silver The Merrimac by Uncanoonuc's falls.
There were five souls of us whom travel's chance Had thrown together in these wild north hills:- A city lawyer, for a month escaping
From his dull office, where the weary eye
Saw only hot brick walls and close thronged streets - Briefless as yet, but with an eye to see Life's sunniest side, and with a heart to take Its chances all as God-sends; and his brother, Pale from long pulpit studies, yet retaining The warmth and freshness of a genial heart,
Whose mirror of the beautiful and true, In Man and Nature, was as yet undimmed By dust of theologic strife, or breath Of sect, or cobwebs of scholastic lore; Like a clear crystal calm of water, taking The hue and image of o'erleaning flowers, Sweet human faces, white clouds of the noon, Slant starlight glimpses through the dewy leaves, And tenderest moonrise. 'Twas, in truth, a study, To mark his spirit, alternating between
A decent and professional gravity
And an irreverent mirthfulness, which often. Laughed in the face of his divinity,
Plucked off the sacred ephod, quite unshrined The oracle, and for the pattern priest
Left us the man. A shrewd, sagacious merchant, To whom the soiled sheet found in Crawford's inn, Giving the latest news of city stocks
And sales of cotton had a deeper meaning Than the great presence of the awful mountains Glorified by the sunset; and his daughter, A delicate flower on whom had blown too long Those evil winds, which, sweeping from the ice And winnowing the fogs of Labrador,
Shed their cold blight round Massachusetts' bay,
With the same breath which stirs Spring's opening leaves And lifts her half-formed flower-bell on its stem,
Poisoning our sea-side atmosphere.
That as we turned upon our homeward way, A drear north-eastern storm came howling up The valley of the Saco; and that girl Who had stood with us upon Mount Washington, Her brown locks ruffled by the wind which whirled In gusts around its sharp cold pinnacle, Who had joined our gay trout-fishing in the streams Which lave that giant's feet; whose laugh was heard Like a bird's carol on the sunrise breeze
Which swelled our sail amidst the lake's green islands, Shrank from its harsh, chill breath, and visibly drooped Like a flower in the frost. So, in that quiet inn Which looks from Conway on the mountains piled Heavily against the horizon of the north, Like summer thunder-clouds, we made our home: And while the mist hung over dripping hills, And the cold wind-driven rain-drops, all day long Beat their sad music upon roof and pane, We strove to cheer our gentle invalid.
The lawyer in the pauses of the storm Went angling down the Saco, and, returning, Recounted his adventures and mishaps; Gave us the history of his scaly clients, Mingling with ludicrous yet apt citations Of barbarous law Latin, passages
From Izaak Walton's Angler, sweet and fresh As the flower-skirted streams of Staffordshire Where, under aged trees, the south-west wind Of soft June mornings fanned the thin, white hair Of the sage fisher. And, if truth be told, Our youthful candidate forsook his sermons, His commentaries, articles and creeds For the fair page of human loveliness
The missal of young hearts, whose sacred text Is music, its illumining sweet smiles.
He sang the songs she loved; and in his low, Deep earnest voice, recited many a page
the holiest, tenderest lines Of the sad bard of Olney the sweet songs, Simple and beautiful as Truth and Nature, Of him whose whitened locks on Rydal Mount Are lifted yet by morning breezes blowing From the green hills, immortal in his lays. And for myself, obedient to her wish,
I searched our landlord's proffered library: A well-thumbed Bunyan, with its nice wood pictures Of scaly fiends and angels not unlike them
Last home, a musty file of Almanacs, And an old chronicle of border wars And Indian history. And, as I read
A story of the marriage of the Chief Of Saugus to the dusky Weetamoo, Daughter of Passaconaway, who dwelt In the old time upon Merrimack, Our fair one, in the playful exercise Of her prerogative the right divine
Of youth and beauty, bade us versify The legend, and with ready pencil sketched. Its plan and outlines, laughingly assigning To each his part, and barring our excuses With absolute will. So, like the cavaliers Whose voices still are heard in the Romance Of silver-tongued Boccacio, on the banks Of Arno, with soft tales of love beguiling The ear of languid beauty, plague-exiled From stately Florence, we rehearsed our rhymes To their fair auditor, and shared by turns Her kind approval and her playful censure.
It may be that these fragments owe alone To the fair setting of their circumstances The associations of time, scene and audience Their place amid the pictures which fill up The chambers of my memory. Yet I trust That some, who sigh, while wandering in thought, Pilgrims of Romance o'er the olden world,
That our broad land
Piled to the clouds,
our sea-like lakes, and mountains our rivers overhung
By forests which have known no other change For ages, than the budding and the fall
our valleys lovelier than those Which the old poets sang of should but figure
On the apocryphal chart of speculation
As pastures, wood-lots, mill-sites, with the privileges, Rights and appurtenances, which make up
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