Narrative Poems, part 2, Bridal of Pennacook | Page 2

of silver
The Merrimac
by Uncanoonuc's falls.
There were five souls of us whom travel's chance
Had thrown

together in these wild north hills
A city lawyer, for a month escaping

From his dull office, where the weary eye
Saw only hot brick walls
and close thronged streets;
Briefless as yet, but with an eye to see

Life's sunniest side, and with a heart to take
Its chances all as
godsends; and his brother,
Pale from long pulpit studies, yet retaining

The warmth and freshness of a genial heart,
Whose mirror of the
beautiful and true,
In Man and Nature, was as yet undimmed
By
dust of theologic strife, or breath
Of sect, or cobwebs of scholastic
lore;
Like a clear crystal calm of water, taking
The hue and image
of o'erleaning flowers,
Sweet human faces, white clouds of the noon,

Slant starlight glimpses through the dewy leaves,
And tenderest
moonrise. 'T was, in truth, a study,
To mark his spirit, alternating
between
A decent and professional gravity
And an irreverent
mirthfulness, which often
Laughed in the face of his divinity,

Plucked off the sacred ephod, quite unshrined
The oracle, and for the
pattern priest
Left us the man. A shrewd, sagacious merchant,
To
whom the soiled sheet found in Crawford's inn,
Giving the latest
news of city stocks
And sales of cotton, had a deeper meaning
Than
the great presence of the awful mountains
Glorified by the sunset;
and his daughter,
A delicate flower on whom had blown too long

Those evil winds, which, sweeping from the ice
And winnowing the
fogs of Labrador,
Shed their cold blight round Massachusetts Bay,

With the same breath which stirs Spring's opening leaves
And lifts
her half-formed flower-bell on its stem,
Poisoning our seaside
atmosphere.
It chanced that as we turned upon our homeward way,
A drear
northeastern storm came howling up
The valley of the Saco; and that
girl
Who had stood with us upon Mount Washington,
Her brown
locks ruffled by the wind which whirled
In gusts around its sharp,
cold pinnacle,
Who had joined our gay trout-fishing in the streams

Which lave that giant's feet; whose laugh was heard
Like a bird's
carol on the sunrise breeze
Which swelled our sail amidst the lake's

green islands,
Shrank from its harsh, chill breath, and visibly drooped

Like a flower in the frost. So, in that quiet inn
Which looks from
Conway on the mountains piled
Heavily against the horizon of the
north,
Like summer thunder-clouds, we made our home
And while
the mist hung over dripping hills,
And the cold wind-driven
rain-drops all day long
Beat their sad music upon roof and pane,

We strove to cheer our gentle invalid.
The lawyer in the pauses of the storm
Went angling down the Saco,
and, returning,
Recounted his adventures and mishaps;
Gave us the
history of his scaly clients,
Mingling with ludicrous yet apt citations

Of barbarous law Latin, passages
From Izaak Walton's Angler,
sweet and fresh
As the flower-skirted streams of Staffordshire,

Where, under aged trees, the southwest wind
Of soft June mornings
fanned the thin, white hair
Of the sage fisher. And, if truth be told,

Our youthful candidate forsook his sermons,
His commentaries,
articles and creeds,
For the fair page of human loveliness,
The
missal of young hearts, whose sacred text
Is music, its illumining,
sweet smiles.
He sang the songs she loved; and in his low,
Deep,
earnest voice, recited many a page
Of poetry, the holiest, tenderest
lines
Of the sad bard of Olney, the sweet songs,
Simple and
beautiful as Truth and Nature,
Of him whose whitened locks on
Rydal Mount
Are lifted yet by morning breezes blowing
From the
green hills, immortal in his lays.
And for myself, obedient to her wish,

I searched our landlord's proffered library,--
A well-thumbed
Bunyan, with its nice wood pictures
Of scaly fiends and angels not
unlike them;
Watts' unmelodious psalms; Astrology's
Last home, a
musty pile of almanacs,
And an old chronicle of border wars
And
Indian history. And, as I read
A story of the marriage of the Chief

Of Saugus to the dusky Weetamoo,
Daughter of Passaconaway, who
dwelt
In the old time upon the Merrimac,
Our fair one, in the
playful exercise
Of her prerogative,--the right divine
Of youth and
beauty,--bade us versify
The legend, and with ready pencil sketched


Its plan and outlines, laughingly assigning
To each his part, and
barring our excuses
With absolute will. So, like the cavaliers

Whose voices still are heard in the Romance
Of silver-tongued
Boccaccio, on the banks
Of Arno, with soft tales of love beguiling

The ear of languid beauty, plague-exiled
From stately Florence, we
rehearsed our rhymes
To their fair auditor, and shared by turns
Her
kind approval and her playful censure.
It may be that these fragments owe alone
To the fair setting of their
circumstances,--
The associations of time, scene, and audience,--

Their place amid the pictures which fill up
The chambers of my
memory. Yet I trust
That some, who sigh, while wandering in thought,

Pilgrims of Romance o'er the olden world,
That our broad
land,--our sea-like lakes and mountains
Piled to the clouds, our rivers
overhung
By forests which have known no other change
For ages
than the budding and the fall
Of leaves, our valleys lovelier than
those
Which the old poets sang of,--should but figure
On the
apocryphal chart of speculation
As pastures, wood-lots, mill-sites,
with the privileges,
Rights, and appurtenances, which make up
A
Yankee Paradise, unsung, unknown,
To beautiful tradition; even