[CHRONICLES OF THE PAST.]
NUMBER TWO.
The application of names to places is often a matter of mere fancy, without a semblance of appropriateness. The belligerent little State of Rhode-Island, for example, bears no more likeness to the Isle of Rhodes, from which it takes its name, than does a West Indian war-club to the queue of a Chinese mandarin. The Bay State is no more the State possessing a bay, than are half the sea-board States in the Union; nor has Connecticut any more claim to the river which enriches her meadows, nor Vermont to the greensward of her hills, than has Massachusetts to the one, or Western Virginia to the other. Far more mal-apropos, however, than all we have mentioned, is the application of palmetto to the chivalrous land of nullification, since neither on upland nor lowland, rice field nor cotton-field, saving only the dwarf specimens upon the sand-banks of Sullivan's Island, is that fantastic tree of the tropics to be found any where within the State. In truth, as a general thing, there is neither character nor cleverness in the application of names to places; and he who should form his notions of the different sections of our country from the appellations they have received, would be much in the condition of Bossuet's student of history, who had taken for his text-books Gulliver's Voyages and Rabelais's Pantagruel.
There is, however, one notable exception to the general fact. New-Hampshire is rightly and truly designated the Granite State. Not only in the bare sides of her stupendous mountains, and the broad bases of her rugged hills, does she partake largely of this firm conglomerate, but in her people also she seems to have compounded no small share of the hard material. Stern, unbending, indomitable, with physical frames like the gnarled oak, and characters rough as the huge boulders upon her soil, New-Hampshire may boast a race of men unequalled for energy and endurance by any other in the world. It would seem as if the old Saxon legend, which makes Tor, the war-god, hew the first man, with hammer and chisel, out of a block of stone, and give him life with a flash of lightning, were fully verified in these hardy sons of the mountains; for they are almost literally men of granite, with electric spirits. It has been my fortune, in a not uneventful life, to have travelled over many portions of the world's surface, and to have seen much of human manners and character; and I can truly say that I have always returned to the barren soil of New-Hampshire with a higher respect and a warmer love for the rude virtues of her sons; and it is now my firm belief, should the day ever come, which may Heaven avert! when dissensions will rend asunder that great charter of our freedom, the Constitution, that Liberty, like the bird we have chosen for her emblem, scared from her resting-place in the capitol, would find her last and secure home among the dwellers on the hill-sides of the Granite State.
This is not equally true, however, of every portion of New-Hampshire. Along the southern borders of her territory the spindle and shuttle have introduced a race who are strangers to the simple virtues of her husbandmen; so that even they, tempted by the lucre of gain, have sadly fallen from the primitive plainness which was once their most enviable characteristic. Neither upon the rich intervales of the Connecticut, where wealth comes unattended by her handmaid labor, will you find the true specimens of her stalwart yeomanry. It is in the distant up-country only, among the townships far removed from the bustle of the manufactory and the crowd of the market-place, that the rough husbandmen of the hard soil, the sterling democracy of our degenerate age, are to be sought and known. There they dwell, the honest country-folk of by-gone days, undisturbed by the changes which time brings over other portions of the world, contented lords of the heritage of their fathers.
Whether it is to be attributed to some peculiarities of climate or of soil, or to some one of those other thousand influences which are ever operating upon the physical frame, it is certain that the maximum of bodily size and human life, over a considerable portion of the Granite State, is at a higher standard than in any other part of our country. It is capable of being demonstrated by the student of history, that more of pure, unadulterated Saxon blood runs in the veins of the backwoodsmen of New-Hampshire, than in any other class of our people; but whether this has any thing to do with the fact we have stated, cannot of course be determined. That fact, however, is established beyond a doubt; and he who would see a peasantry of sturdier frames and greater age than is to be found elsewhere in the whole world, may find them scattered over the rough soil and along the narrow valleys of the White Mountains. Six feet in height, and one hundred and sixty pounds in weight, make elsewhere a man above the customary standard; but in New-Hampshire scores of young men, from six feet two inches to six feet five, and weighing a hundred and ninety pounds, never deem themselves above the ordinary size. I have in my mind's eye at this moment ten young men, who would weigh two hundred pounds, without a single ounce of surplus flesh, and I doubt not thousands over the State could be found to match them in every way.
The portion of the State of which this is peculiarly true, lies north of the Winnepisseogee lake. It is a country of all others most uninviting to the farmer, and one wonders what could have tempted its first settlers to have selected it as a home. Huge rocks, tumbled from the mountains, lie thickly scattered over the tillage-ground and pastures; ledges, bare or covered with dark green moss, run for miles often through farms and homesteads; precipitous banks and abrupt precipices swell and break over the whole landscape; and the entire country is ploughed with deep ravines, and barren with a scanty soil, beyond what any description can convey. To the lover of nature, indeed, it is a country full of beauty. Those old hills, black with forests of Norway pine, lying like the sleeping guardians of the beautiful lake by their side; and those rustic cottages, scattered along the narrow valley which the retreating waters have left between themselves and the mountains; and finer than all, the numerous water-falls that leap and dash and gurgle onward over scaur and precipice and wooded cliff toward the Winnepisseogee, which seems waiting like some gentle mother to welcome her joyous children to her bosom; are well worth the journey of many a long mile to the scenery-loving tourist. But the people are poor. Toiling from year to year with unceasing industry, they gain from the hard soil a bare livelihood, from youth to old age. Happy indeed in their poverty; contented, unaspiring, and satisfied if the last days of December shall find them no poorer than they commenced the year, and the produce of the farm has proved sufficient to pay the tax of poll and parsonage, and yield a sufficiency for the winter's store.
The features of the country strike the eye accustomed to a more dense population as singularly unique. One may travel those roads, winding through the mountain passes and along the high palisades, for days, and see neither village nor hamlet, nothing indeed but the low, unpainted houses, sometimes prettily covered with jessamine and ivy, but more often bare of all taste or adornment, saving the solitary lilac-trees which stand in the corners of the court-yards, or the old scented thorn-bushes by the side of the door. Looking down sometimes from an elevation he has gained, they seem to the traveller, those cottages, like martins' nests, dotting the curving shores of some beautiful bay; and again from some deep ravine, they appear like fairy domicils, perched high on the cliffs and ramparts of the mountains. Interspersed in every few miles are the district school-houses and the parish churches, the one almost invariably standing upon the fork of two or more roads, and the other crowning the summit of the highest hill attainable by horse and vehicle. And then the country tavern, whose long shed and sanded hall give surety to the stranger and his beast of a comfortable noon-tide baiting; or, in the more solitary townships, where the places of entertainment are few and far between, the quiet nook by the forest road-side, where the dipper hangs beside the overflowing water-trough, and the guide-board measures out the long miles between him and his evening resting-place; each and all objects of pleasant recollection to the traveller, as he muses upon his journeyings in after life.
The effect of a mountain atmosphere upon the health and spirits of mankind has long been known to the medical faculty, and has been treated of by its most distinguished writers. Its equal tendency to the extension of human life, however, naturally as it seems to follow from the other, has been entirely overlooked. And yet this is as capable of satisfactory demonstration as any fact connected with the animal economy. Nor is this the only fact of interest in regard to this subject, which presents itself to the attentive and accurate observer. It is also capable of proof, that up to a certain distance from the equator, the length of life increases in a steady ratio with the degrees of latitude. In some recent statistics which have been carefully taken, and which upon their completion will be given to the world, it has been ascertained that the average length of human life is thirteen per cent. greater in the mountain districts of New-Hampshire than it is upon the sea-board country of Massachusetts or Maine; fourteen per cent. greater than in New-York or Pennsylvania; seventeen per cent. greater than in Virginia; and twenty-two per cent. greater than in any State south of the parallel of thirty-five degrees. There are indeed other causes to be taken into the account, to which we cannot now refer, which are every where recognized as having an important influence upon the physique, if not indeed upon the morale, of the human race. But entirely aside from these, the principle of an increasing age directly following a diminishing temperature, can be most satisfactorily shown; so that the rough mountaineer of New-Hampshire has as much right to calculate upon the good old age of eighty-six, as has the lordly planter of the Sea Islands to the premature decrepitude of three-score.
This extreme old age to which the agriculturalists of New-Hampshire attain, is perceptible to the most casual observer. Over the whole country we have described, evidences of the truth of this force themselves upon his attention, wherever he goes. The old man of seventy-five years still mows his swath in the summer, and bends his sickle in the autumn, with the elastic vigor of the prime of manhood. The barn rings with the heavy strokes of the flail, swung in alternate succession by the veteran and his grandson. The cozy couple, who could tell you stories of their own experience in revolutionary days, ride each Sabbath morning side by side upon the pillioned saddle to the house of God. The simple head-stones in the church-yard also, though they may often record the premature decay of some bright blossom of the social circle, more frequently point out the resting-places of those who were gathered to their graves like the shock of corn that cometh in in its season. In the town of Moultonborough, for example, where the population scarcely reaches to thirteen hundred souls, no less than forty-four persons have died since 1833, whose average ages were ninety-eight years. Of these forty-four, twenty-six had exceeded a century, and the youngest of the band was cut off at the premature age of eighty-seven. 'Think of that, Master Brook!' But the oldest of the group, he who was for many years the banner-veteran of our worthies, and whose memory, we opine, will still be foremost for many years to come; he, our hearty Scotchman, whose monument rises by the church-yard gate, he, unshrinking, undismayed, stood erect under the accumulated weight of six score and seven full-told years!