ENGRAVED BY J. ANDREWS AND J. DUTHIE.
“But, as tenderly before him, the lorn Ximena knelt,
She saw the Northern eagle shining on his pistol belt." Page 810.
ENGRAVED BY D. L. GLOVER.
"Nay, I do not need thy sword, Comrade mine," said Ury's lord; “ Put it
up I pray
thee.”
ENGRAVED BY D. L. GLOVER.
From a Daguerreotype of a French Print.
“ Beams of noon like burning lances, through the tree-tops flash
and glisten, As she stands before her lover, with raised face to look and
listen.”
ENGRAVED BY A. C. WARREN.
Each Moslem, Tomb, and Cypress old, Looked holy through the sunset air.
THE BRIDAL OF PENNACOOK..
We had been wandering for many days Through the rough northern country.
We had seen 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 echolastic 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.
It chanced 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
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