Literary and Social Essays | Page 2

citizen, the amateur Corydon
struggling with imperfect stroke behind him, of the mystic romance of
city life.
The sluggish repose of the little river images the farmer-boy's life. He
bullies his oxen, and trembles at the locomotive. His wonder and fancy
stretch towards the great world beyond the barn-yard and the village
church as the torpid stream tends towards the ocean. The river, in fact,
seems the thread upon which all the beads of that rustic life are
strung--the clew to its tranquil character. If it were an impetuous stream,
dashing along as if it claimed and required the career to which every
American river is entitled, a career it would have. Wheels, factories,
shops, traders, factory-girls, boards of directors, dreary white lines of
boarding-houses, all the signs that indicate the spirit of the age, and of
the American age, would arise upon its margin. Some shaven magician
from State Street would run up by rail, and, from proposals, maps,
schedules of stock, etc., educe a spacious factory as easily as Aladdin's
palace arose from nothing. Instead of a dreaming, pastoral poet of a
village, Concord would be a rushing, whirling, bustling manufacturer
of a town, like its thrifty neighbor Lowell. Many a fine equipage,
flashing along city ways--many an Elizabethan-Gothic-Grecian rural
retreat, in which State Street woos Pan and grows Arcadian in summer,
would be reduced, in the last analysis, to the Concord mills. Yet if these
broad river meadows grew factories instead of corn, they might perhaps
lack another harvest, of which the poet's thought is the sickle.
"One harvest from your field Homeward brought the oxen strong.
Another crop your acres yield, Which I gather in a song,"
sings Emerson, and again, as the afternoon light strikes pensive across
his memory, as over the fields below him:
"Knows he who tills this lonely field, To reap its scanty corn, What
mystic crops his acres yield, At midnight and at morn?"
The Concord River, upon whose winding shores the town has scattered
its few houses--as if, loitering over the plain some fervent day, it had
fallen asleep obedient to the slumberous spell, and had not since
awakened--is a languid, shallow stream, that loiters through broad

meadows, which fringe it with rushes and long grasses. Its sluggish
current scarcely moves the autumn leaves showered upon it by a few
maples that lean over the Assabet--as one of its branches is named.
Yellow lily-buds and leathery lily-pads tessellate its surface, and the
white water-lilies--pale, proud Ladies of Shalott--bare their virgin
breasts to the sun in the seclusion of its distant reaches. Clustering
vines of wild grape hang its wooded shores with a tapestry of the South
and the Rhine. The pickerel-weed marks with blue spikes of flowers the
points where small tributary brooks flow in, and along the dusky
windings of those brooks cardinal-flowers with a scarlet splendor paint
the tropics upon New England green. All summer long, from founts
unknown, in the upper counties, from some anonymous pond or
wooded hillside moist with springs, steals the gentle river through the
plain, spreading at one point above the town into a little lake, called by
the farmers "Fairhaven Bay", as if all its lesser names must share the
sunny significance of Concord. Then, shrinking again, alarmed at its
own boldness, it dreams on towards the Merrimac and the sea.
The absence of factories has already implied its shallowness and
slowness. In truth it is a very slow river, belonging much more to the
Indian than to the Yankee; so much so, indeed, that until within a very
few years there was an annual visit to its shores from a few sad heirs of
its old masters, who pitched a group of tents in the meadows, and wove
their tidy baskets and strung their beads in unsmiling silence. It was the
same thing that I saw in Jerusalem among the Jews. Every Friday they
repair to the remains of the old temple wall, and pray and wail,
kneeling upon the pavement and kissing the stones. But that passionate
Oriental regret was not more impressive than this silent homage of a
waning race, who, as they beheld the unchanged river, knew that,
unlike it, the last drops of their existence were gradually flowing away,
and that for their tribes there shall be no ingathering.
So shallow is the stream that the amateur Corydons who embark at
morning to explore its remoter shores will, not infrequently in
midsummer, find their boat as suddenly tranquil and motionless as the
river, having placidly grounded upon its oozy bottom. Or, returning at
evening, they may lean over the edge as they lie at length in the boat,
and float with the almost imperceptible current, brushing the tips of the
long water-grass and reeds below them in the