As to the river, there are rivers and rivers, as the saying is; at some we marvel, some we fear and to some we make pilgrimages as to the Mecca of the faithful. But the Merrimac is a river to be loved, and to be loved the better the more familiar it is. What its poet, Whittier, says about it must be literally true:
"Our river by its valley born Was never yet forgotten."
It is worth while to try to imagine it as he writes it in "Cobbler Keezer's Vision" two hundred and more years ago, when that old fellow was so amazed at the prospect of mirth and pleasure among the descendants of the stern Puritans that he dropped his lapstone into the water in bewilderment.
"Woodsy and wild and lonesome, The swift stream wound away, Through birches and scarlet maples Flashing in foam and spray."
"Down on the sharp-horned ledges Plunging in steep cascade, Tossing its white-maned waters Against the hemlock's shade."
"Woodsy and wild and lonesome, East and west and north and south; Only the village of fishers Down at the river's mouth;"
"Only here and there a clearing, With its farm-house rude and new, And tree-stumps, swart as Indians, Where the scanty harvest grew."
What a picture that is! And then behind these tree-stumps, the great forest with its possibilities of comfort and even of competence in its giant timbers,--when they were fairly floored, but; as it stood, a threatening foe with a worse enemy in its depths than the darkness of its shadows, or the wild beasts.
Several of Mr. Whittier's songs of the Merrimac were written for picnics, given at the Laurels on the Newbury side of the river by a gentlemen and his wife from Newburyport. They were early abolitionists, friends and hosts of Garrison, of George Thompson and others of that brave band, and of course friends of the poet. This hospitable couple gave a picnic here every June for twenty years. The first was a little party of perhaps half-a-dozen people, the twenty-first was a large assembly. Mr. Whittier was present at these picnics whenever able, and, as has been said, sometimes wrote a poem to be read there. He never reads in public himself.
Although the Powow river has been made so emphatically a stream of use, there are glimpses of a native beauty in it that its hard fate has never obliterated; these are still there, as one stands upon the little bridge that spans its last few rods of individual life and looks up the stream upon a wintry landscape, or upon summer fields, and longingly toward the bend.