Literary and Social Essays | Page 3

stream--a river jungle, in

which lurk pickerel and trout--with the sensation of a bird drifting upon
soft evening air over the tree-tops. No available or profitable craft
navigate these waters, and animated gentlemen from the city who run
up for "a mouthful of fresh air" cannot possibly detect the final cause of
such a river. Yet the dreaming idler has a place on maps and a name in
history.
Near the town it is crossed by three or four bridges. One is a massive
structure to help the railroad over. The stern, strong pile readily betrays
that it is part of good, solid stock, owned in the right quarter. Close by
it is a little arched stone bridge, auxiliary to a great road leading to
some vague region of the world called Acton upon guide-posts and on
maps. Just beyond these bridges the river bends and forgets the railroad,
but it is grateful to the graceful arch of the little stone bridge for
making its curve more picturesque, and, as it muses towards the Old
Manse, listlessly brushing the lilies, it wonders if Ellery Channing, who
lives beyond, upon a hill-side sloping to the shore, wrote his poem of
"The Bridge" to that particular one. There are two or three wooden
bridges also, always combining well with the landscape, always
making and suggesting pictures.
The Concord, as I said, has a name in history. Near one of the wooden
bridges you turn aside from the main road, close by the Old Mause
--whose mosses of mystic hue were gathered by Hawthorne, who lived
there for three years--and a few steps bring you to the river and to a
small monument upon its brink. It is a narrow, grassy way; not a field
nor a meadow, but of that shape and character which would perplex the
animated stranger from the city, who would see, also, its unfitness for a
building-lot. The narrow, grassy way is the old road, which in the
month of April, 1775, led to a bridge that crossed the stream at this spot.
And upon the river's margin, upon the bridge and the shore beyond,
took place the sharp struggle between the Middlesex farmers and the
scarlet British soldiers known in tradition as "Concord fight". The small
monument records the day and the event. When it was erected Emerson
wrote the following hymn for the ceremony:
APRIL 19, 1836.
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze
unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot
heard round the world.

"The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream that
seaward creeps.
"On this green bank, by this soft stream, We see to-day a votive stone,
That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are
gone.
"Spirit that made these heroes dare To die, or leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and
Thee."
Close under the rough stone wall at the left, which separates it from the
little grassy orchard of the Manse, is a small mound of turf and a
broken stone. Grave and headstone shrink from sight amid the grass
and under the wall, but they mark the earthly bed of the first victims of
that first fight. A few large trees overhang the ground, which
Hawthorne thinks have been planted since that day, and he says that in
the river he has seen mossy timbers of the old bridge, and on the farther
bank, half hidden, the crumbling stone abutments that supported it. In
an old house upon the main road, nearly opposite the entrance to this
grassy way, I knew a hale old woman who well remembered the gay
advance of the flashing soldiers, the terrible ring and crack of fire-arms,
and the panic-stricken retreat of the regulars, blackened and bloody.
But the placid river has long since overborne it all. The alarm, the
struggle, the retreat, are swallowed up in its supreme tranquillity. The
summers of more than seventy years have obliterated every trace of the
road with thick grass, which seeks to bury the graves, as earth buried
the victims. Let the sweet ministry of summer avail. Let its mild
iteration even sap the monument and conceal its stones as it hides the
abutment in foliage; for, still on the sunny slopes, white with the May
blossoming of apple-orchards, and in the broad fields, golden to the
marge of the river, and tilled in security and peace, survives the
imperishable remembrance of that day and its results.
The river is thus the main feature of the Concord landscape. It is
surrounded by a wide plain, from which rise only