From Wolfborough the route was east by the Maine Central Railroad to Portland, and thence by steamer to Boston. There are many beautiful places in the vicinity of Portland, and particularly about the popular summer resorts of Mount Desert Island and Bar Harbor; but much must be sacrificed to the limit of space, for no one book can ever contain pictures of all the natural scenery that is worthy to be reproduced. Among other photographs taken in and about Portland, we have room for only one, viz.: the light-house on Cape Elizabeth, in the harbor, a dreary desolation of stone, where the ocean is treacherous and a warning to incoming vessels is indispensable.
Boston is historic ground, around which are many sacred spots perpetuated in patriotic memories. It is a great city; but the traveled visitor is indifferent to municipal sights, and is restless to pay his tribute of respect and curiosity to those shrines that keep in mind the reverent character of the Puritan, and the heroism of the Revolutionary soldier. It is hard to resist this infectious temptation to photograph monuments and battle-fields, when one is walking upon the very famous dust, and reading inscriptions recording the valor of those who fought for our National Independence; but this is a volume devoted to American scenery rather than to American history, a subject which ought to inspire equal patriotic sentiment, and monumental tributes must therefore be omitted, or casually mentioned by incidental reference, as may appear proper.
From Boston our artist proceeded by a train on the Old Colony Railroad to Cohasset, a town which it has been truthfully said marks one of the most interesting, most wildly beautiful bits of nature on any coast.
“This town,” let it be said, “marks one of the most interesting, most wildly beautiful bits of nature on any known coast. In this situation are to be found all the beauties and all the terrors which ocean scenes can compass. The history of Cohasset, for the past two hundred and fifty years, has in it an element personal to every civilized people on the globe, since all have sent their ships and their travelers this way, and added names to the death-roll hereabouts. The crags and ledges along these shores have taken part in ocean tragedies for generations, and have witnessed more of human suffering and the extremity of distress than often falls to the lot of natural scenes. Upon their faces the ocean surges have never ceased to dash themselves since the morning of creation. Here the whiteness never goes out of the line of surf; and often the conditions are of shattered waters flying in the air, of roaring breakers crashing into fragments along the rocks, of great masses of billows lashed into fury, and resistless in their commonest attacks by all except the natural barriers to their progress here set up.”
THE CLIFFS AT NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND.
Beautiful, commanding, stirring as the scenes are about Cohasset’s bounding shores, yet the tragedies which have occurred in the treacherous approaches to the harbor are both numerous and heart-appalling. On these very rocks, where the waters usually play in such happy abandon, more than seven score of persons from a single ship—the St. John, in October, 1849—were dashed to their deaths, and disasters attended by less mortality became so common that the Government erected a lighthouse at Minot’s Ledge, which is two miles off Cohasset Point, where the hidden rocks are most dangerous to shipping.
From Cohasset the trip was south, by the Old Colony, along the Atlantic shore, passing many points of great interest, though for scenery there is nothing but marshes and a waste of sandy beach. But on the way, Daniel Webster’s farm is pointed out, located on a level strip between the railroad and Marshfield Neck, where it would appear that raising clams might be more profitably pursued than the growing of grain or vegetable. Quaint scenes, reminders of the olden times when stage-coaching was the most luxurious mode of travel, and pot-hooks and hangers were adjuncts of the crane that rendered the fire-place the sole convenience for cooking, pass in review and are a source of the greatest interest to those of a retrospective and reflective turn of mind. Here and there we observe old Puritan churches and equally old-fashioned people, whose appearances indicate that they have not been widely distributed since the Mayflower landed. There is a Miles Standish, John Alden and Priscilla in every village, and the houses, in many cases, tell of a time quite as remote. Indeed, in the little but ancient hamlet of Greenbush, which is within a half-dozen miles of Cohasset, and twice as far to Nantasket, an intensely fashionable resort, one may see the identical old oaken bucket and the crazy sweep by which “dripping with coolness it rose from the well,” which inspired Woodworth’s immortal lay in 1817. There, too, is the same old house, hiding behind a clump of trees, under which the poet sat and drank from the “full blushing goblet,” which, alas for human weakness, he really coveted less than a beaker of good wine.
PURGATORY CHASM, NEAR NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND.