Where'er thou sail'st who sailed with me,
Though now thou climbest loftier mounts,
And fairer rivers dost ascend,
Be thou my Muse, my Brother - .
-
I am bound, I am bound, for a distant shore,
By a lonely isle, by a far Azore,
There it is, there it is, the treasure I seek,
On the barren sands of a desolate creek.
-
I sailed up a river with a pleasant wind,
New lands, new people, and new thoughts to find;
Many fair reaches and headlands appeared,
And many dangers were there to be feared;
But when I remember where I have been,
And the fair landscapes that I have seen,
^Thou^ seemest the only permanent shore,
The cape never rounded, nor wandered o'er.
-
Fluminaque obliquis cinxit declivia ripis;
Quae, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa;
In mare perveniunt partim, campoque recepta
Liberioris aquae, pro ripis litora pulsant.
^Ovid^, Met. I. 39
He confined the rivers within their sloping banks,
Which in different places are part absorbed by the earth,
Part reach the sea, and being received within the plain
Of its freer waters, beat the shore for banks.
-
CONCORD RIVER.
"Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw,
Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies,
Here, in pine houses, built of new-fallen trees,
Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell."
^Emerson^.
The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as
the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized
history, until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish
attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the
other but kindred name of ^Concord^ from the first plantation on
its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of
peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass
grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while
men lead peaceable lives on its banks. To an extinct race it was
grass-ground, where they hunted and fished, and it is still
perennial grass-ground to Concord farmers, who own the Great
Meadows, and get the hay from year to year. "One branch of it,"
according to the historian of Concord, for I love to quote so
good authority, "rises in the south part of Hopkinton, and
another from a pond and a large cedar-swamp in Westborough," and
flowing between Hopkinton and Southborough, through Framingham,
and between Sudbury and Wayland, where it is sometimes called
Sudbury River, it enters Concord at the south part of the town,
and after receiving the North or Assabeth River, which has its
source a little farther to the north and west, goes out at the
northeast angle, and flowing between Bedford and Carlisle, and
through Billerica, empties into the Merrimack at Lowell. In
Concord it is, in summer, from four to fifteen feet deep, and
from one hundred to three hundred feet wide, but in the spring
freshets, when it overflows its banks, it is in some places
nearly a mile wide.
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