Essays · A Walk To Wachusett (1/2)

Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travellers; whether with Homer, on a spring morning, we sat down on the many-peaked Olympus, or, with Virgil and his compeers, roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, or with Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and Teneriffe.

With frontier strength ye stand your ground,

With grand content ye circle round,

Tumultuous silence for all sound,

Ye distant nursery of rills,

Monadnock, and the Peterboro’ hills;

Like some vast fleet,

Sailing through rain and sleet,

Through winter’s cold and summer’s heat;

Still holding on, upon your high emprise,

Until ye find a shore amid the skies;

Not skulking close to land,

With cargo contraband.

For they who sent a venture out by ye

Have set the sun to see

Their honesty.

Ships of the line, each one,

Ye to the westward run,

Always before the gale,

Under a press of sail,

With weight of metal all untold.

I seem to feel ye, in my firm seat here,

Immeasurable depth of hold,

And breadth of beam, and length of running gear.

Methinks ye take luxurious pleasure

In your novel western leisure;

So cool your brows, and freshly blue,

As Time had nought for ye to do;

For ye lie at your length,

An unappropriated strength,

Unhewn primeval timber,

For knees so stiff, for masts so limber;

The stock of which new earths are made,

One day to be our western trade,

Fit for the stanchions of a world

Which through the seas of space is hurled.

While we enjoy a lingering ray,

Ye still o’ertop the western day,

Reposing yonder, on God’s croft,

Like solid stacks of hay.

Edged with silver, and with gold,

The clouds hang o’er in damask fold,

And with such depth of amber light

The west is dight,

Where still a few rays slant,

That even heaven seems extravagant.

On the earth’s edge mountains and trees

Stand as they were on air graven,

Or as the vessels in a haven

Await the morning breeze.

I fancy even

Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven;

And yonder still, in spite of history’s page,

Linger the golden and the silver age;

Upon the laboring gale

The news of future centuries is brought,

And of new dynasties of thought,

From your remotest vale.

But special I remember thee,

Wachusett, who like me

Standest alone without society.

Thy far blue eye,

A remnant of the sky,

Seen through the clearing or the gorge,

Or from the windows on the forge,

Doth leaven all it passes by.

Nothing is true,

But stands ’tween me and you,

Thou western pioneer,

Who know’st not shame nor fear,

By venturous spirit driven,

Under the eaves of heaven,

And can’st expand thee there,

And breathe enough of air?

Upholding heaven, holding down earth,

Thy pastime from thy birth,

Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other;

May I approve myself thy worthy brother!

At length, like Rasselas, and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we resolved to scale the blue wall which bound the western horizon, though not without misgivings, that thereafter no visible fairy land would exist for us. But we will not leap at once to our journey’s end, though near, but imitate Homer, who conducts his reader over the plain, and along the resounding sea, though it be but to the tent of Achilles. In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where men go and come. The landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest travelled. Taking advantage of the early hour on a pleasant morning in July, my companion and I passed rapidly through Acton and Stow, stopping to rest and refresh us on the bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Assabet, in the latter town. As we traversed the cool woods of Acton, with stout staves in our hands, we were cheered by the song of the red-eye, the thrushes, the phoebe, and the cuckoo; and as we passed through the open country, we inhaled the fresh scent of every field, and all nature lay passive, to be viewed and travelled. Every rail, every farmhouse, seen dimly in the twilight, every tinkling sound told of peace and purity, and we moved happily along the dank roads, enjoying not such privacy as the day leaves when it withdraws, but such as it has not profaned. It was solitude with light; which is better than darkness. But anon, the sound of the mower’s rifle was heard in the fields, and this, too, mingled with the herd of days.

This part of our route lay through the country of hops. Perhaps there is no plan which so well supplies the want of the vine in American scenery, and may remind the traveller so often of Italy, and the south of France, whether he traverses the country when the hop-fields, as then, present solid and regular masses of verdure, hanging in graceful festoons from pole to pole; the cool coverts where fresh gales are born to refresh the wayfarer; or in September, when the women and children, and the neighbors from far and near, are gathered to pick the hops into long troughs; or later still, when the poles stand piled in immense pyramids in the yards, or lie in heaps by the roadside.

The culture of the hop, with the processes of picking, drying in the kiln, and packing for the market, as well as the uses to which it is applied, so analogous to the culture and uses of the grape, may afford a theme for future poets.

The mower in the adjacent meadow could not tell us the name of the brook on whose banks we had rested, or whether it had any, but his younger companion, perhaps his brother, knew that it was Great Brook. Though they stood very near together in the field, the things they knew were very far apart; nor did they suspect each other’s reserved knowledge, till the stranger came by. In Bolton, while we rested on the rails of a cottage fence, the strains of music which issued from within, probably in compliment to us sojourners, reminded us that thus far men were fed by the accustomed pleasures. So soon did we begin to learn that man’s life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new. The flowers grow more various ways than he. But coming soon to higher land, which afforded a prospect of the mountains, we thought we had not travelled in vain, if it were only to hear a truer and wilder pronunciation of their names, from the lips of the inhabitants; not Way-tatic, Way-chusett, but Wor-tatic, Wor-chusett. It made us ashamed of our tame and civil pronunciation, and we looked upon them as born and bred farther west than we. His tongue had a more generous accent than ours, as if breath was cheaper when it wagged. A countryman, who speaks but seldom, talks copiously, as it were, as his wife sets cream and cheese before you without stint. Before noon we had reached the highlands in the western part of Bolton, overlooking the valley of Lancaster, and affording the first fair and open prospect into the west, and here, on the top of a hill, in the shade of some oaks, near to where a spring bubbled out from a leaden pipe, we rested during the heat of the day, reading Virgil, and enjoying the scenery. It was such a place as one feels to be on the outside of the earth, for from it we could, in some measure, see the form and structure of the globe. There lay the object of our journey, coming upon us with unchanged proportions, though with a less ethereal aspect than had greeted our morning gaze, while further north, in successive order, slumbered the sister mountains along the horizon.

We could get no further into the Aeneid than

—atque altae moenia Romae,

—and the wall of high Rome,

before we were constrained to reflect by what myriad tests a work of genius has to be tried; that Virgil, away in Rome, two thousand years off, should have to unfold his meaning, the inspiration of Italian vales, to the pilgrim on New England hills. This life so raw and modern, that so civil and ancient; and yet we read Virgil, mainly to be reminded of the identity of human nature in all ages, and by the poet’s own account, we are both the children of a late age, and live equally under the reign of Jupiter.

“He shook honey from the leaves, and removed fire,

And stayed the wine, everywhere flowing in rivers;

That experience, by meditating, might invent various arts

By degrees, and seek the blade of corn in furrows,

And strike out hidden fire from the veins of the flint.”

The old world stands serenely behind the new, as one mountain yonder towers behind another, more dim and distant. Rome imposes her story still upon this late generation. The very children in the school we had that morning passed, had gone through her wars, and recited her alarms, ere they had heard of the wars of neighboring Lancaster. The roving eye still rests inevitably on her hills. She still holds up the skirts of the sky, and makes the past remote.

The lay of the land hereabouts is well worthy the attention of the traveller. The hill on which we were resting makes part of an extensive range, running from southwest to northeast, across the country, and separating the waters of the Nashua from those of the Concord, whose banks we had left in the morning; and by bearing in mind this fact, we could easily determine whither each brook was bound that crossed our path. Parallel to this, and fifteen miles further west, beyond the deep and broad valley in which lie Groton, Shirley, Lancaster, and Boylston, runs the Wachusett range, in the same general direction. The descent into the valley on the Nashua side, is by far the most sudden; and a couple of miles brought us to the southern branch of that river, a shallow but rapid stream, flowing between high and gravelly banks. But we soon learned that there were no gelidae valles into which we had descended, and missing the coolness of the morning air, feared it had become the sun’s turn to try his power upon us.

“The sultry sun had gained the middle sky,

And not a tree, and not an herb was nigh.”

and with melancholy pleasure we echoed the melodious plaint of our fellow-traveller, Haman, in the desert⁠—

“Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,

When first from Schina’s walls I bent my way.”

The air lay lifeless between the hills, as in a seething cauldron, with no leaf stirring, and instead of the fresh odor of grass and clover, with which we had before been regaled, the dry scent of every herb seemed merely medicinal. Yielding, therefore, to the heat, we strolled into the woods, and along the course of a rivulet, on whose banks we loitered, observing at our leisure the products of these new fields. He who traverses the woodland paths, at this season, will have occasion to remember the small drooping bell-like flowers and slender red stem of the dogs-bane, and the coarser stem and berry of the poke, which are both common in remoter and wilder scenes; and if “the sun casts such a reflecting heat from the sweet fern,” as makes him faint, when he is climbing the bare hills, as they complained who first penetrated into these parts, the cool fragrance of the swamp pink restores him again, when traversing the valleys between.

On we went, late in the afternoon refreshed ourselves by bathing our feet in every rill that crossed the road, and anon, as we were able to walk in the shadows of the hills, recovered our morning elasticity. Passing through Sterling, we reached the banks of the Stillwater, in the western part of the town, at evening, where is a small village collected. We fancied that there was already a certain western look about this place, a smell of pines and roar of water, recently confined by dams, belying its name, which were exceedingly grateful. When the first inroad has been made, a few acres levelled, and a few houses erected, the forest looks wilder than ever. Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight. This village had, as yet, no post-office, nor any settled name. As we entered upon its street, the villagers gazed after us, with a complacent, almost compassionate look, as if we were just making our debut in the world at a late hour. “Nevertheless,” did they seem to say, “come and study us, and learn men and manners.” So is each one’s world but a clearing in the forest, so much open and enclosed ground. The landlord had not yet returned from the field with his men, and the cows had yet to be milked. But though we met with no very hospitable reception here at first, we remembered the inscription on the wall of the Swedish inn, and were comforted: “You will find at Trolhate excellent bread, meat, and wine, provided you bring them with you.” But I must confess it did somewhat disturb our pleasure, in this withdrawn spot, to have our own village newspaper handed us by our host, as if the greatest charm the country offered to the traveller was the facility of communication with the town. Let it recline on its own everlasting hills, and not be looking out from their summits for some petty Boston or New York in the horizon.

At intervals we heard the murmuring of water, and the slumberous breathing of crickets throughout the night; and left the inn the next morning in the gray twilight, after it had been hallowed by the night air, and when only the innocent cows were stirring, with a kind of regret. It was only four miles to the base of the mountain, and the scenery was already more picturesque. Our road lay along the course of the Stillwater, which was brawling at the bottom of a deep ravine, filled with pines and rocks, tumbling fresh from the mountains, so soon, alas! to commence its career of usefulness. At first, a cloud hung between us and the summit, but it was soon blown away. As we gathered the raspberries, which grew abundantly by the roadside, that action seemed consistent with a lofty prudence, as well as agreeable to the palate, as if the traveller who ascends into a mountainous region should fortify himself by eating of such light ambrosial fruits as grow there, and drinking of the springs which gush out from the mountain sides, as he gradually inhales the subtler and purer atmosphere of those elevated places, thus propitiating the mountain gods, by a sacrifice of their own fruits. The gross products of the plains and valleys are for such as dwell therein; but surely the juices of this berry had relation to the thin air of the mountain tops.