The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 5.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

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[361] a lakelike placidity above contrasting with the foam and murmur of the falls below. And this was all which modern improvements had left of ‘the great Patucket Falls’ of the olden time. The wild river had been tamed; the spirit of the falls, whose hoarse voice the Indian once heard in the dashing of the great water down the rocks, had become the slave of the arch conjurer, Art; and, like a shorn and blinded giant, was grinding in the prison-house of his taskmaster.

One would like to know how this spot must have seemed to the ‘twenty goodlie persons from Concord and Woburn’ who first visited it in 1652, as, worn with fatigue, and wet from the passage of the sluggish Concord, ‘where ford there was none,’ they wound their slow way through the forest, following the growing murmur of the falls, until at length the broad, swift river stretched before them, its white spray flashing in the sun. What cared these sturdy old Puritans for the wild beauty of the landscape thus revealed before them? I think I see them standing there in the golden light of a closing October day, with their sombre brown doublets and slouched hats, and their heavy matchlocks, —such men as Ireton fronted death with on the battle-field of Naseby, or those who stalked with Cromwell over the broken wall of Drogheda, smiting, ‘in the name of the Lord,’ old and young, ‘both maid, and little children.’ Methinks I see the sunset light flooding the river valley, the western hills stretching to the horizon, overhung with trees gorgeous and glowing with the tints of autumn,—a mighty flower-garden, blossoming under