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

ming up their week, with one eye out on the golden sun,
and one toe upon a reed, eying the wondrous universe in
which they act their part; the fishes swam more staid and
soberly, as maidens go to church; shoals of golden and silver
minnows rose to the surface to behold the heavens, and then
sheered off into more sombre aisles; they swept by as if moved
by one mind, continually gliding past each other, and yet
preserving the form of their battalion unchanged, as if they
were still embraced by the transparent membrane which held
the spawn; a young band of brethren and sisters trying their
new fins; now they wheeled, now shot ahead, and when we
drove them to the shore and cut them off, they dexterously
tacked and passed underneath the boat. Over the old wooden
bridges no traveller crossed, and neither the river nor the
fishes avoided to glide between the abutments.
Here was a village not far off behind the woods, Billerica,
settled not long ago, and the children still bear the names of
the first settlers in this late “howling wilderness”; yet to all
intents and purposes it is as old as Fernay or as Mantua, an
old gray town where men grow old and sleep already under
moss-grown monuments,—outgrow their usefulness. This
is ancient Billerica, (Villarica?) now in its dotage, named from
the English Billericay, and whose Indian name was
A <strong>Week</strong> on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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Shawshine. I never heard that it was young. See, is not nature
here gone to decay, farms all run out, meeting-house
grown gray and racked with age? If you would know of its
early youth, ask those old gray rocks in the pasture. It has a
bell that sounds sometimes as far as Concord woods; I have
heard that,—ay, hear it now. No wonder that such a sound
startled the dreaming Indian, and frightened his game, when
the first bells were swung on trees, and sounded through the
forest beyond the plantations of the white man. But to-day I
like best the echo amid these cliffs and woods. It is no feeble
imitation, but rather its original, or as if some rural Orpheus
played over the strain again to show how it should sound.
Dong, sounds the brass in the east,
As if to a funeral feast,
But I like that sound the best
Out of the fluttering west.
The steeple ringeth a knell,
But the fairies’ silvery bell
Is the voice of that gentle folk,
Or else the horizon that spoke.