A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
by Henry David Thoreau
AUTHOR OF “WALDEN,” ETC.
Contents
| CONCORD RIVER |
| SATURDAY |
| SUNDAY |
| MONDAY |
| TUESDAY |
| WEDNESDAY |
| THURSDAY |
| FRIDAY |
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;
Quæ, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa;
In mare perveniunt partim, campoque recepta
Liberioris aquæ, 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 orEuphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history, until the fameof its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635,when it received the other but kindred name of CONCORD from thefirst plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spiritof peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows andwater runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable liveson its banks. To an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted andfished, and it is still perennial grass-ground to Concord farmers, who own theGreat Meadows, and get the hay from year to year. “One branch ofit,” according to the historian of Concord, for I love to quote so goodauthority, “rises in the south part of Hopkinton, and another