A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

With such thoughts we swept gently by this now peaceful
pasture-ground, on waves of Concord, in which was long
since drowned the din of war.
But since we sailed
Some things have failed,
And many a dream
Gone down the stream.
Here then an aged shepherd dwelt,
Who to his flock his substance dealt,
And ruled them with a vigorous crook,
By precept of the sacred Book;
But he the pierless bridge passed o’er,
And solitary left the shore.
Anon a youthful pastor came,
Whose crook was not unknown to fame,
His lambs he viewed with gentle glance,
Spread o’er the country’s wide expanse,
And fed with “Mosses from the Manse.”
Henry David Thoreau
15
Here was our Hawthorne in the dale,
And here the shepherd told his tale.
That slight shaft had now sunk behind the hills, and we
had floated round the neighboring bend, and under the new
North Bridge between Ponkawtasset and the Poplar Hill, into
the Great Meadows, which, like a broad moccason print,
have levelled a fertile and juicy place in nature.
On Ponkawtasset, since, we took our way,
Down this still stream to far Billericay,
A poet wise has settled, whose fine ray
Doth often shine on Concord’s twilight day.
Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high,
Shining more brightly as the day goes by,
Most travellers cannot at first descry,
But eyes that wont to range the evening sky,
And know celestial lights, do plainly see,
And gladly hail them, numbering two or three;