THE BRIDAL OF PENNACOOK.

1848.

POEMS.

THE BRIDAL OF PENNACOOK. 1

We had been wandering for many days
Through the rough northern country. We had seen
The sunset, with its bars of purple cloud,
Like a new heaven, shine upward from the lake
Of Winnepiseogee; and had felt

The sunrise breezes, midst the leafy isles
Which stoop their summer beauty to the lips
Of the bright waters. We had checked our steeds,
Silent with wonder, where the mountain wall
Is piled to heaven; and, through the narrow rift
Of the vast rocks, against whose rugged feet
Beats the mad torrent with perpetual roar,
Where noonday is as twilight, and the wind
Comes burdened with the everlasting moan
Of forests and of far-off water-falls,

We had looked upward where the summer sky,
Tasselled with clouds light-woven by the sun,
Sprung its blue arch above the abutting crags
O'er-roofing the vast portal of the land
Beyond the wall of mountains We had passed
The high source of the Saco; and bewildered
In the dwarf spruce-belts of the Crystal Hills
Had heard above us, like a voice in the cloud,
The horn of Fabyan sounding; and atop
Of old Agioochook had seen the mountains
Piled to the northward, shagged with wood, and thick
As meadow mole hills-the far sea of Casco,

A white gleam on the horizon of the east;
Fair lakes, embosomed in the woods and hills ;
Moosehillock's mountain range, and Kearsarge
Lifting his Titan forehead to the sun!

And we had rested underneath the oaks
Shadowing the bank, whose grassy spires are

shaken

By the perpetual beating of the falls
Of the wild Ammonoosuc. We had tracked
The winding Pemigewasset, overhung

By beechen shadows, whitening down its rocks,
Or lazily gliding through its intervals,

From waving rye-fields sending up the gleam
Of sunlit waters. We had seen the moon
Rising behind Umbagog's eastern pines
Like a great Indian camp-fire; and its beams
At midnight spanning with a bridge of silver
The Merrimack 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 God-sends; 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. 'Twas, 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 sea-side 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