III
A STORIED RIVER AND BATTLE-FIELD
Where Zenobia Drowned—Where Embattled Farmers Fought—Thoreau's Hemlocks—Haunts of Hawthorne—Channing—Thoreau—Emerson, etc.
BEHIND Hawthorne's "Old Manse"—its course so tortuous that Thoreau suggested for Concord's escutcheon "a field verdant with the river circling nine times round," so noiseless that he likened it to the "moccasined tread" of an Indian, so sluggish that Hawthorne had dwelt some weeks beside it before he determined which way its current lies—flows the Concord, "river of peace." This placid stream is the aboriginal "Musketaquid" of Emerson's poem,—sung of Thoreau, Channing, and many another bard, beloved of Hawthorne and pictured in rapturous phrase in his "Note-Books" and "Mosses from an Old Manse." It was the delightful haunt of Hawthorne's leisure, the scene of the occurrence which inspired the most thrilling and high-wrought chapter of his romance.
A grassy path, shaded by orchard trees, leads from the west door of the Manse to the river's margin at the place where Hawthorne kept his boat under the willows. The boat had before been the property of Thoreau, built by his hands and used by him on the famous voyage described in his "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers." Hawthorne named the craft "Pond-Lily," because it brought so many cargoes of that beautiful flower to decorate his home. In it, alone or accompanied by Thoreau or Ellery Channing, he made the many delightful excursions he has described. Embarking on the slumberous stream, we follow the course of Hawthorne's boat to many a scene made familiar by that dreamful romancer and by the poets and philosophers of Concord. First to the place, below the bridge of the battle, where one dark night Hawthorne and Channing assisted in recovering from the water the ghastly body of the girl-suicide, an incident which made a profoundly horrible impression upon the sensitive novelist, and which he employed as the thrilling termination of the tale of Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance,"—portraying it with a tragic power which has never been surpassed. Thence we paddle up the placid stream, as it slumbers along its winding course between the meadows, kisses the tangled grasses and wild flowers that fringe its margins, bathes the roots and boughs of the elders and dwarf willows which overhang its surface as if to gaze upon the reflections of their own loveliness mirrored there. The reach of river—"from Nashawtuc to the Cliff"—above the confluence of the two branches was most beloved and frequented of Thoreau; here he sometimes brought Emerson, as on that summer evening when the sage's diary records, "the river-god took the form of my valiant Henry Thoreau and introduced me to the riches of his shadowy, starlit, moonlit stream," etc.
The deeper portion of the river near the Manse was Hawthorne's habitual resort for bathing and fishing, but his longer solitary voyages and his "wild, free days" with Ellery Channing were upon the beautiful and sheltered North Branch,—the Assabeth of the "Mosses,"—which flows into the Concord a half-mile above the Manse. Into this branch we turn our boat, and through sunshine and shade we follow the winsome course of the lingering stream, finding new and delightful seclusion at every turn. A railway now lies along one lofty bank, but its unsightliness is concealed by long lines of willows planted by the loving hands of poet and artist,—Bartlett and French,—and the infrequent trains little disturb the seclusion of the place. Giant trees, standing with "their feet fixed in the flood," bend their bright foliage above the softly-flowing stream and fleck its surface with shadows; pond-lilies are still up-borne by its dreaming waters, and cardinal flowers bedeck its banks; its barer reaches are ribbons of reflected sky. The spot on the margin locally known as "The Hemlocks," and noted by Hawthorne as being only less sacred in his memory than the household hearth, remains itself undisturbed. Here a clump of great evergreens projects from the base of the lofty bank above and across the stream, and forms on the shore a shaded bower, carpeted by the brown needles which have fallen through many a year. This was a favorite haunt of Hawthorne and Channing in blissful days; here they prepared their sylvan noontide feasts; here they lounged and dreamed; here their "talk gushed up like the babble of a fountain." As we recline in their accustomed resting-place beside the sighing stream, and look up at the azure heaven through the boughs where erstwhile often curled the smoke of their fire, we vainly try to imagine something of what would be the converse, merry or profound, of such starry spirits amid such an inspiring scene, and we more than ever regret that neither the gentle poet nor the subtle romancer has chosen to share that converse with his readers.
Long and lovingly we loiter in this consecrated spot, and then slowly float back to Hawthorne's landing-place by his orchard wall.
A few rods distant, at the corner of his field, is the site of the "rude bridge that arched the flood," and the first battle-ground of the American Revolution. On the farther side a colossal minute-man in bronze, modelled by the Concord sculptor French, surmounts a granite pedestal inscribed with Emerson's immortal epic, and marks the spot where stood the irregular array of the "embattled farmers" when they here "fired the shot heard round the world." The statue replaces a bush which sprang from the soil fertilized by the blood of Davis, and which Emerson imaged as the "burning bush where God spake for his people."