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

There are already essays and poems, the growth of this land,
which are not in vain, all which, however, we could conveniently
have stowed in the till of our chest. If the gods permitted
their own inspiration to be breathed in vain, these
might be overlooked in the crowd, but the accents of truth
are as sure to be heard at last on earth as in heaven. They
already seem ancient, and in some measure have lost the traces
of their modern birth. Here are they who
“ask for that which is our whole life’s light,
For the perpetual, true and clear insight.”
I remember a few sentences which spring like the sward in
its native pasture, where its roots were never disturbed, and
not as if spread over a sandy embankment; answering to the
poet’s prayer,
“Let us set so just
A rate on knowledge, that the world may trust
The poet’s sentence, and not still aver
A <strong>Week</strong> on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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Each art is to itself a flatterer.”
But, above all, in our native port, did we not frequent the
peaceful games of the Lyceum, from which a new era will be
dated to New England, as from the games of Greece. For if
Herodotus carried his history to Olympia to read, after the
cestus and the race, have we not heard such histories recited
there, which since our countrymen have read, as made Greece
sometimes to be forgotten?—Philosophy, too, has there her
grove and portico, not wholly unfrequented in these days.
Lately the victor, whom all Pindars praised, has won another
palm, contending with
“Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.”
What earth or sea, mountain or stream, or Muses’ spring
or grove, is safe from his all-searching ardent eye, who drives
off Phoebus’ beaten track, visits unwonted zones, makes the