We Passed A Large And Densely Wooded Island This Forenoon,
Between Short's And Griffith's Falls, The Fairest Which We Had
Met With, With A Handsome Grove Of Elms At Its Head.
If it had
been evening we should have been glad to camp there.
Not long
after, one or two more were passed. The boatmen told us that the
current had recently made important changes here. An island
always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small
continent and integral portion of the globe. I have a fancy for
building my hut on one. Even a bare, grassy isle, which I can
see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious
charm for me. There is commonly such a one at the junction of
two rivers, whose currents bring down and deposit their
respective sands in the eddy at their confluence, as it were the
womb of a continent. By what a delicate and far-stretched
contribution every island is made! What an enterprise of Nature
thus to lay the foundations of and to build up the future
continent, of golden and silver sands and the ruins of forests,
with ant-like industry! Pindar gives the following account of
the origin of Thera, whence, in after times, Libyan Cyrene was
settled by Battus. Triton, in the form of Eurypylus, presents a
clod to Euphemus, one of the Argonauts, as they are about to
return home.
"He knew of our haste,
And immediately seizing a clod
With his right hand, strove to give it
As a chance stranger's gift.
Nor did the hero disregard him, but leaping on the shore,
Stretching hand to hand,
Received the mystic clod.
But I hear it sinking from the deck,
Go with the sea brine
At evening, accompanying the watery sea.
Often indeed I urged the careless
Menials to guard it, but their minds forgot.
And now in this island the imperishable seed of spacious Libya
Is spilled before its hour."
It is a beautiful fable, also related by Pindar, how Helius, or
the Sun, looked down into the sea one day, - when perchance his
rays were first reflected from some increasing glittering
sandbar, - and saw the fair and fruitful island of Rhodes
"springing up from the bottom,
Capable of feeding many men, and suitable for flocks;
and at the nod of Zeus,
"The island sprang from the watery
Sea; and the genial Father of penetrating beams,
Ruler of fire-breathing horses, has it."
The shifting islands! who would not be willing that his house
should be undermined by such a foe! The inhabitant of an island
can tell what currents formed the land which he cultivates; and
his earth is still being created or destroyed. There before his
door, perchance, still empties the stream which brought down the
material of his farm ages before, and is still bringing it down
or washing it away, - the graceful, gentle robber!
Not long after this we saw the Piscataquoag, or Sparkling Water,
emptying in on our left, and heard the Falls of Amoskeag above.
Large quantities of lumber, as we read in the Gazetteer, were
still annually floated down the Piscataquoag to the Merrimack,
and there are many fine mill privileges on it. Just above the
mouth of this river we passed the artificial falls where the
canals of the Manchester Manufacturing Company discharge
themselves into the Merrimack. They are striking enough to have
a name, and, with the scenery of a Bashpish, would be visited
from far and near. The water falls thirty or forty feet over
seven or eight steep and narrow terraces of stone, probably to
break its force, and is converted into one mass of foam. This
canal-water did not seem to be the worse for the wear, but foamed
and fumed as purely, and boomed as savagely and impressively, as
a mountain torrent, and, though it came from under a factory, we
saw a rainbow here. These are now the Amoskeag Falls, removed a
mile down-stream. But we did not tarry to examine them minutely,
making haste to get past the village here collected, and out of
hearing of the hammer which was laying the foundation of another
Lowell on the banks. At the time of our voyage Manchester was a
village of about two thousand inhabitants, where we landed for a
moment to get some cool water, and where an inhabitant told us
that he was accustomed to go across the river into Goffstown for
his water. But now, as I have been told, and indeed have
witnessed, it contains fourteen thousand inhabitants. From a
hill on the road between Goffstown and Hooksett, four miles
distant, I have seen a thunder-shower pass over, and the sun
break out and shine on a city there, where I had landed nine
years before in the fields; and there was waving the flag of its
Museum, where "the only perfect skeleton of a Greenland or river
whale in the United States" was to be seen, and I also read in
its directory of a "Manchester Athenaeum and Gallery of the Fine
Arts."
According to the Gazetteer, the descent of Amoskeag Falls, which
are the most considerable in the Merrimack, is fifty-four feet in
half a mile. We locked ourselves through here with much ado,
surmounting the successive watery steps of this river's staircase
in the midst of a crowd of villagers, jumping into the canal to
their amusement, to save our boat from upsetting, and consuming
much river-water in our service. Amoskeag, or Namaskeak, is said
to mean "great fishing-place." It was hereabouts that the Sachem
Wannalancet resided. Tradition says that his tribe, when at war
with the Mohawks, concealed their provisions in the cavities of
the rocks in the upper part of these falls. The Indians, who hid
their provisions in these holes, and affirmed "that God had cut
them out for that purpose," understood their origin and use
better than the Royal Society, who in their Transactions, in the
last century, speaking of these very holes, declare that "they
seem plainly to be artificial." Similar "pot-holes" may be seen
at the Stone Flume on this river, on the Ottaway, at Bellows'
Falls on the Connecticut, and in the limestone rock at Shelburne
Falls on Deerfield River in Massachusetts, and more or less
generally about all falls.
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