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

Some youthful spring, perchance, still empties with tinkling
music into the oldest river, even when it is falling into the
sea, and we imagine that its music is distinguished by the
river-gods from the general lapse of the stream, and falls
sweeter on their ears in proportion as it is nearer to the ocean.
As the evaporations of the river feed thus these unsuspected
springs which filter through its banks, so, perchance, our
aspirations fall back again in springs on the margin of life’s
stream to refresh and purify it. The yellow and tepid river
may float his scow, and cheer his eye with its reflections and
its ripples, but the boatman quenches his thirst at this small
rill alone. It is this purer and cooler element that chiefly sustains
his life. The race will long survive that is thus discreet.
Our course this morning lay between the territories of
Merrimack, on the west, and Litchfield, once called Brenton’s
Farm, on the east, which townships were anciently the Indian
Naticook. Brenton was a fur-trader among the Indians,
and these lands were granted to him in 1656. The latter township
contains about five hundred inhabitants, of whom, however,
we saw none, and but few of their dwellings. Being on
the river, whose banks are always high and generally conceal
A <strong>Week</strong> on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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the few houses, the country appeared much more wild and
primitive than to the traveller on the neighboring roads. The
river is by far the most attractive highway, and those boatmen
who have spent twenty or twenty-five years on it must
have had a much fairer, more wild, and memorable experience
than the dusty and jarring one of the teamster who has
driven, during the same time, on the roads which run parallel
with the stream. As one ascends the Merrimack he rarely
sees a village, but for the most part alternate wood and pasture
lands, and sometimes a field of corn or potatoes, of rye
or oats or English grass, with a few straggling apple-trees,
and, at still longer intervals, a farmer’s house. The soil, excepting
the best of the interval, is commonly as light and
sandy as a patriot could desire. Sometimes this forenoon the
country appeared in its primitive state, and as if the Indian
still inhabited it, and, again, as if many free, new settlers
occupied it, their slight fences straggling down to the water’s
edge; and the barking of dogs, and even the prattle of children,
were heard, and smoke was seen to go up from some
hearthstone, and the banks were divided into patches of pasture,
mowing, tillage, and woodland. But when the river