USA > New Hampshire > To Monadnock; the records of a mountain in New Hampshire through three centuries > Part 6
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How looks Appledore in a storm? I have seen it when its crags seemed frantic, Butting against the mad Atlantic,
When surge on surge would heap enorme, Cliffs of emerald topped with snow, That lifted and lifted, and then let go
A great white avalanche of thunder,
A grinding, blinding, deafening ire
Monadnock might have trembled under; And the island, whose rock-roots pierce below To where they are warmed with the central fire, You could feel its granite fibres racked
As it seemed to plunge with a shudder and thrill Right at the breast of the swooping hill, And to rise again snorting a cataract-
110
THOREAU'S NORTHWEST HORIZON*, 1851
I From Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist by William Ellery Channing, 1873.
The hills Anursnac, Nashawtuc, Fairhaven [in the vicinity of Concord] are not lofty. Yet they have sufficient outlook, and carry the eye to Monadnock and the Peterboro' Hills, while nearer blue Wachusett stands alone. Thoreau visited more than once the principal mountains in his prospect. It was like looking off on a series of old homes.
II
From Thoreau's Journal, Walden Edition (1906), by the courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Nov. 13 [1851]. To Fairhaven Hill.
A cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west. The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety. Such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart. A day in which you must hold on to life by your teeth. You can hardly ruck up any skin on Nature's bones. The sap is down; she won't peel. Now is the time to cut timber for yokes and ox- bows, leaving the tough bark on,-yokes for your own neck, finding yourself yoked to Matter and to Time. Truly a hard day, hard times these! Not a mosquito left. Not an insect to hum. Crickets gone into winter quarters. Friends long since gone there, and you left to walk on frozen ground, with your hands in your pockets. . . A day when you cannot pluck
[*See also supra, Thoreau's poem to these mountains, 1842; and post, Thoreau, for the years 1852 (Sept. 27), 1853 and 1857.]
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TO MONADNOCK
a flower, cannot dig a parsnip, nor pull a turnip, for the frozen ground ! What do the thoughts find to live on? . . Now is there nothing, not even the cold beauty of ice crystals and snowy architecture, nothing but the echo of your steps over the frozen ground, no voice of birds nor frogs. You are dry as a farrow cow. The earth will not admit a spade. All fields lie fallow. Shall not your mind ? ..
The mountains are of an uncommonly dark blue today. Perhaps this is owing, not only to the greater clearness of the atmosphere, which brings them nearer, but to the absence of the leaves! They are many miles nearer for it. A little misti- ness occasioned by warmth would set them further off and make them fainter. I see snow on the Peterboro Hills, reflect- ing the sun. It is pleasant thus to look from afar into winter. We look at a condition which we have not reached. Notwith- standing the poverty of the immediate landscape, in the horizon it is simplicity and grandeur. I look into valleys white with snow and now lit up by the sun, while all this country is in shade. This accounts for the cold northwest wind. There is a great gap in the mountain range just south of the two Peter- boro hills. Methinks I have been through it, and that a road runs there. At any rate, humble as these mountains are com- pared with some, yet at this distance I am convinced they answer the purpose of Andes; and, seen in the horizon, I know of noth- ing more grand and stupendous than this great mountain gate or pass, a great cleft or sinus in the blue banks, as in a dark evening cloud, fit portal to lead from one country, from one quarter of the earth, to another, where the children of the Israelites may file through. Little does the New Hampshire farmer who drives over that road realize through what a sublime gap he is passing. You would almost as soon think of a road to wind through and over a dark evening cloud.
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THOREAU'S NORTHWEST HORIZON, 1851
This prospect of the mountains from our low hills is what I would rather have than pastures on the mountain-sides such as my neighbors own, aye, than townships at their base. Instead [of driving] my cattle up in May, I turn my eyes that way. My eyes pasture there, and straightway the yearling thoughts come back. The grass they feed on never withers .. .
I do not fear my thoughts will die, For never yet it was so dry As to scorch the azure of the sky. It knows no withering and no drought ; Though all eyes crop, it ne'er gives out. My eyes my flocks are; Mountains my crops are.
I do not fear my flocks will stray, For they were made to roam the day, For they can wander with the latest light, Yet be at home at night.
113
MONADNOCK AT THE DUBLIN CENTENNIAL June 17, 1852
I
From a letter by Dr. Ebenezer Morse of Walpole, formerly of Dublin, N. H., read at the Centennial exercises and published in The History of Dublin.
But one object, and a very prominent one, in the features of Dublin scenery, remains very little altered during the last fifty years, or even the last six thousand years; and that is old Monadnoc.
There he stands, gazing far up in the sky, Expecting a kiss from the clouds that pass by. His head is quite bald, and has been growing gray Since Adam and Eve saw the light of the day. His nightcap of fog always keeps on his head, Till all the damp clouds to the ocean have fled. His jacket and coat that he formerly wore,
Composed of short spruces, are seen there no more; In a fire with high wind he once happened to lose 'em, And the brilliant carbuncle he wore in his bosom.
In these tangled forests the wolves used to roam,
And howl through the woods when their whelps were half grown;
And well I remember when my uncle Ben
Brought three home alive, which he took from their den.
And many a sheep, from their ravenous bite,
Have had their blood sucked from their throats in one night. But a wolf-hunt is called from the neighboring towns,
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THE DUBLIN CENTENNIAL, 1852
They take up their march with a whoop and a hollo! And a ring of sharp-shooters the mountain surrounds. The hounds take the lead, and the hunters all follow ; But the wolves were too cunning, so hide in their den, And never were seen by the hounds or the men. All the game of the hunt is a great lazy bear, Whose flesh, when well roasted, the company share.
II
From a letter written by Daniel Elliot, M. D., of Marlborough, New York, read at the Centennial exercises, and published in The History of Dublin.
Gentlemen : I have received your invitation to be present at the centennial celebration of the settlement of my native town on the 17th instant. I need not assure you of the great pleasure it would afford me to be among you on that interesting occasion ; to exchange congratulations, recall reminiscences, and mingle sympathies with such as remain from among the friends of my boyhood. But circumstances beyond my control will deprive me of that gratification. I pray you to accept my thanks for your kind and flattering invitation, and to offer to my brethren of the good old town of Dublin my hearty congratulations. ..
The committee will also accept my grateful acknowledge- ments for the part assigned me in the exercises of the day-to speak to "Old Monadnock," my venerable and long-cherished friend ! Nothing could be more congenial to my feelings. His image, in all its aspects, is ineffaceably impressed upon the tablets of my memory. His very name strikes a cord within me, that vibrates as to the sound of grand and solemn music. His idea is part and parcel of my being; and to his influence on my young imagination do I owe much of the enjoyment I have derived from nature's varied works. I remember him when
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TO MONADNOCK
clothed with verdant foliage to the very summit. I saw, year after year, the devouring flames climbing his lofty sides, exhibit- ing him to the surrounding country as a dread volcano or a giant beacon, till half his leafy mantle disappeared. But I like him best in naked majesty,-bald, hoary, stern, asserting his own fixed character. Many a toilsome pilgrimage have I made to his lofty summit, to feast upon the wide-spread banquet for the eye that stretches in all directions from his base. I have spread my blanket on the mossy rocks of his bleak and hoary brow, watching the brilliant stars through the solemn stillness of the night, to catch the first gleaming of the dawn, and hail the earliest beams of the rising sun, while all below was dim and misty; and richly did the glory of the scene repay the toil. I have visited mountains more known to fame, I have stood on higher elevations; but from no point have I found the view so satisfactory-uniting so much of grandeur, beauty, variety and extent-as from the brow of old Monadnock. I hail him King of Mountains! May his shadow never be less!
III
From the Centennial Address by Charles Mason, once of Dublin, attorney and counsellor-at-law of Fitchburg, Mass. The History of Dublin by Levi W. Leonard, 1855.
The summit of the mountain, standing lofty and lonely, has ever been watched with interest as an index of the weather. Enshrouded in dense clouds, or veiled in impenetrable mist, it bespeaks the present genius of the impending storm. There, too, dwells the hidden force, which, in the sultry heats of summer, attracts the cloud "surcharged with wrathful vapor," from whose dark bosom darts the crinkling lightning, and the descending thunder-bolt bursts, shivering the rocks, cleaving deep fissures, or tumbling huge fragments down the precipices.
116
MOONLIGHT ON MOUNTAINS [1852]
Neither should we omit to mention the brightness and beauty of the sunlight, which, in a clear evening, lingers around the top of the mountain, as if loath to depart; nor the glittering display, when, on a winter's afternoon, the scattered slanting rays of the descending sun are thrown from the surface of the ice- encrusted snow; nor yet the cold, dazzling brilliancy which, in a winter's sunrise, encircles its snowy head; nor, finally, that more enchanting sight, vouchsafed to imagination's credulous vision, which, in the soft beauty of a moonlit summer's evening, was charmed with the pure light of the flaming, storied car- buncle.
MOONLIGHT ON MOUNTAINS [1852]
From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Walden Edition, 1906, Houghton Mifflin Co.
June 28 [1852]. I have camped out all night on the tops of four mountains,-Wachusett, Saddleback, Ktaadn and Monad- nock,-and I usually took a ramble over the summit at mid- night by moonlight. I remember the moaning of the wind on the rocks, and that you seemed much nearer to the moon than on the plains. The light is then in harmony with the scenery. Of what use the sunlight to the mountain-summits? From the cliffs you looked off into vast depths of illumined air.
117
THOREAU'S VISIT TO MONADNOCK, 1852
From Thoreau's Journal, Walden Edition, 1906, by courtesy of the Houghton Mifflin Company.
Sept. 6, [1852]. Monday. To Peterboro. Railroad to Mason Village .. . Walked from Mason Village over the moun- tain-tops to Peterboro. . . The tavern-keeper at Temple said the summit just south of the Peterboro road, covered with wood, was the highest (probably a mistake),-980 feet above Temple Common, which is itself very high. Went across lots from here toward this. When part way up, or on a lower part of the ridge, discovered it was not the highest, and turned north- ward across the road to what is apparently the highest. . . Al- ready we had had experience of a mountain-side covered with bare rocks as if successive thunder spouts had burst over it, and bleached timber lying across the rocks, the woodbine red as blood about a tall stump, and the strong, sweet, bracing scent of ferns between the rocks, the raspberry bushes still retaining a few berries. . . We went down the west side of this first mountain, from whose summit we could not see west on account of an- other ridge; descended far, and across the road, and up the southernmost of what I have called the Peterboro Hills [Pack Monadnock]. . . Went, still across lots, to Peterboro village. . .
A man in Peterboro told me that his father told him that Monadnock used to be covered with forest, that fires ran through it and killed the turf; then the trees were blown down, and their roots turned up and formed a dense and impenetrable thicket in which the wolves abounded. They came down at night, killed sheep, etc., and returned to their dens, whither they could not be pursued before morning; till finally they set fire to this thicket, and it made the greatest fire they had ever had in the county, and drove out all the wolves, which have
118
THOREAU'S VISIT TO MONADNOCK, 1852
not troubled them since. He himself had seen one wolf killed there when he was a boy. They kill now raccoons, hedgehogs and wildcats there. . .
Sept. 7, Tuesday. Went, across lots still, to Monadnock, the base some half-dozen miles in a straight line from Peter- boro. . . Joe Eavely's, the house nearest the top that we saw under the east side, a small red house a little way up. The summit hardly more than a mile distant in a straight line, but about two miles as they go .. .
Were on the top of the mountain at 1 P. M. The cars left Troy, four or five miles off, at three. We reached the depot, by running at last, at the same instant the cars did, and reached Concord at a quarter after five, i. e. four hours from the time we were picking blueberries on the mountain, with the plants of the mountain fresh in my hat.
II
[Concord], Sept. 27 [1852], Monday. P. M .- To C. Smith's Hill. The flashing clearness of the atmosphere. More light appears to be reflected from the earth, less absorbed. . .
From Smith's Hill I looked toward the mountain line. Who can believe that the mountain peak which he beholds fifty miles off in the horizon, rising far and faintly blue above an intermediate range, while he stands on his trivial native hills or in the dusty highway, can be the same with that which he looked up at once near at hand from a gorge in the midst of primitive woods! For a part of two days I traveled across lots once, loitering by the way, through primitive wood and swamps, over the highest peak of the Peterboro Hills to Monadnock, by ways from which all landlords and stage-drivers endeavored to dissuade us. It was not a month ago. But now that I look
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TO MONADNOCK
across the globe in an instant to the dim Monadnock peak, and these familiar fields and copse-woods appear to occupy the greater part of the interval, I cannot realize that Joe Eavely's house still stands there at the base of the mountain, and all that long tramp through wild woods with invigorating scents before I got to it. I cannot realize that on the tops of those cool blue ridges are in abundance berries still, bluer than them- selves, as if they borrowed their blueness from their locality. From the mountains we do not discern our native hills, but from our native hills we look out easily to the far blue moun- tains which seem to preside over them. As I look northwest- ward to that summit from a Concord cornfield, how little can I realize all the life that is passing between me and it,-the retired up-country farmhouses, the lonely mills, wooded vales, wild rocky pastures, and new clearings on stark mountain sides, and rivers murmuring through primitive woods. All these, and how much more, I overlook. I see the very peak,-there can be no mistake,-but how much I do not see that is be- tween me and it! . . In this way we see stars. What is it but a faint blue cloud, a mist that may vanish? But what is it, on the other hand, to one who has traveled to it day after day, has threaded the forest and climbed the hills that are between this and that, has tasted the raspberries or the blueberries that grow on it, and the springs that gush from it, has been wearied with climbing its rocky sides, felt the coolness of its summit, and been lost in the clouds there?
120
STILL THE NORTHWEST HORIZON,* 1853-7
I "A SERMON ON THE MOUNT"
From Thoreau's Journal, Walden Edition, 1908, by the courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company.
May 10 [1853]. . . The value of the mountains in the hori- zon,-would not that be a good theme for a lecture? The text for a discourse on real values, and permanent; a sermon on the mount. They are stepping stones to heaven-as the rider has a horse-block at his gate-by which to mount when we would commence our pilgrimage to heaven; by which we gradually take our departure from earth from the time when our youthful eyes first rested on them,-from this bare actual earth, which has so little of the hue of heaven. They make it easier to die and easier to live. They let us off. .
Whether any picture by a human master hung on our western wall could supply their place. Whether to shovel them away and level them would really smooth the way to the true west. Whether the skies would not weep over their scars. They are valuable to mankind as is the iris of the eye to a man. They are the path of the translated. The undisputed territory be- tween earth and heaven. In our travels rising higher and higher, we at length got to where the earth was blue. Sug- gesting that this earth, unless our conduct curse it, is as celestial as that sky.
*See supra, Thoreau's Horizon Mountains, 1842; Thoreau's Northwest Horizon, 1851; Thoreau's Visit to Monadnock, 1852, II.
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TO MONADNOCK
II "MY MOUNTAIN FENCE"
From Thoreau's Journal, Walden Edition, 1906, by the courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Oct. 22 [1857]. . . Look from the high hill, just before sun- down, over the pond. The mountains are a mere cold slate- color. But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? Even as pines and larches and hemlocks grow in communities in the wilderness, so, it seems, do mountains love society and form a community in the horizon. Though there may be two or more ranges, one behind the other, and ten or twelve miles between them, yet if the farthest are the highest, they are all seen as one group at this distance. I look up northwest toward my moun- tains, as a farmer to his hill lot or rocky pasture from his door. I drive no cattle to Ipswich hills. I own no pasture for them there. My eyes it is alone that wander to those blue pastures, which no drought affects. They are my flocks and herds. See how they look. They are shaped like tents, inclining to sharp peaks. What is it lifts them upward so? Why not rest level along the horizon? They seem not perfect, they seem not satis- fied, until their central parts have curved upward to a sharp summit. They are a succession of pickets with scallops between. That side my pasture is well fenced. This being their upper side, I fancy they must have a corresponding under side and roots also. Might they not be dug up like a turnip? Perhaps they spring from seeds which some wind sowed. Can't the Patent Office import some of the seed of Himmaleh with its next rutabagas? Spore of mountains has fallen there; it came from the gills of an agaric. Ah, I am content to dwell here and see the sun go down behind my mountain fence.
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STILL THE NORTHWEST HORIZON, 1853-7
III "SO THE MOUNTAINS HAVE A BLOOM"
From Thoreau's Journal, Walden Edition, 1906, by the courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Nov. 4, 1857. . . I see in the path some rank thimble-berry shoots covered with that peculiar hoary bloom very thickly. It is only rubbed off in a few places down to the purple skin, by some passing hunter perchance. It is a very singular and delicate outer coat, surely, for a plant to wear. I find that I can write my name on it with a pointed stick very distinctly, each stroke, however fine, going down to the purple. It is a new kind of enamelled card. What is this bloom, and what purpose does it serve? Is there anything analogous in animated nature? It is the coup de grace, the last touch and perfection of any work, a thin elysian veil cast over it, through which it may be viewed. It is breathed on by the artist, and thereafter his work is not to be touched without injury. ..
I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting, this cool evening. Sitting with my back to a thick oak sprout whose leaves still glow with life, Walden lies, an oblong square endwise to, be- neath me. Its surface is slightly rippled, and dusky prolonged reflections of trees extend wholly across its length, or half a mile,-I sit high. The sun is once or twice its diameter above the horizon, and the mountains north of it stand out grand and distinct, a decided purple. But when I look critically, I dis- tinguish a whitish mist-such is the color of the denser air --- about their lower parts, while their tops are dark blue. (So the mountains have a bloom on them; and is not the bloom on fruits equivalent to that blue veil of air which distance gives to many objects?) I see one glistening reflection on the dusky and leafy northwestern earth, seven or eight miles off, betray-
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TO MONADNOCK
ing a window there, though no house can be seen. It twinkles incessantly, as from a waving surface. This, probably, is the undulation of the air. Now that the sun is actually setting, the mountains are dark blue from top to bottom. As usual, a small cloud attends the sun to the portals of the day and re- flects this brightness to us, now that he is gone. But those grand and glorious mountains, how impossible to remember daily that they are there, and to live accordingly! They are meant to be a perpetual reminder to us, pointing out the way.
124
THOREAU'S VISIT TO MONADNOCK, 1858
I
From a letter to Daniel Ricketson by Thoreau, June 30, 1858; in Familiar Letters edited by Franklin B. Sanborn, Houghton Mifflin Company.
I made an excursion with Blake, of Worcester, to Monad- nock a few weeks since. We took our blankets and food, spent two nights on the mountain, and did not go into a house.
II
From Thoreau's Journal, Walden Edition, 1906, by the courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company.
June 2 [1858]. 8.30 A. M .- Start for Monadnock.
Between Shirley Village and Lunenburg I notice, in a meadow on the right hand, close to the railroad, the Kalmia glauca in bloom, as we are whirled past. The conductor says that he has it growing in his garden. Blake joins me at Fitch- burg. Between Fitchburg and Troy saw an abundance of wild red cherry, now apparently in prime, in full bloom, especially in burnt lands and on hillsides, a small but cheerful lively white bloom.
Arrived at Troy station at 11.5 and shouldered our knap- sacks, steering northeast to the mountain-some four miles off, its top. It is a pleasant hilly road, leading past a few farm- houses, where you already begin to snuff the mountain, or at least up-country air. . . Almost without interruption we had the mountain in sight before us, its sublime gray mass that antique, brownish-gray, Ararat color. Probably these crests of
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TO MONADNOCK
the earth are for the most part of one color in all lands,-that gray color of antiquity which nature loves; color of un- painted wood, weather-stain, time-stain; not glaring nor gaudy ; the color of all roofs, the color of things that endure and the color that wears well; color of Egyptian ruins, of mummies and all antiquity ; baked in the sun, done brown; . . not scarlet, like the crest of the bragging cock, but that hard, enduring gray; a terrene sky-color; solidified air with a tinge of earth.
The red elder was in full bloom by the road, apparently in prime.
We left the road at a school house, and, crossing a meadow, began to ascend gently through very rocky pastures. Pre- viously an old man, a mile back, who lived on a hilltop on the road, pointed out the upper corner of his pasture as a short way up. Said he had not been up for seven years and, looking at our packs, asked, "Are you going to carry them up? Well," said he, with a tone half of pity and half regret, adding, "I shall never go up again." . . The neighboring hills began to sink, and entering the wood we soon passed Fassett's shanty*,-he so busily at work inside that he did not see us,-and we took our dinner by the rocky brookside in the woods just above. A dozen people passed us early in the afternoon while we sat there,-men and women on their way down from the summit, this suddenly very pleasant day after a louring one, having attracted them. . .
Having risen above the dwarfish woods (in which mountain ash was very common) which reached higher up along this ravine than elsewhere, and nearly all the visitors having
*[Joseph Fassett. . . in 1854. . . built a rude stone hostel only a few rods beyond where the Mountain House was later built. Its ruins are still there close beside the main brook, on the Fairy Spring Trail to Monte Rosa (Allen Chamberlain in The Boston Transcript, Aug. 25, 1920).]
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THOREAU'S VISIT TO MONADNOCK, 1858
descended, we proceeded to find a place for and to prepare our camp at mid-afternoon. We wished it to be near water, out of the way of the wind-which was northwest-and of the path, and also near to spruce trees, for a bed. (There is a good place, if you would be near the top, within a stone's-throw of the summit, on the north side, under some spruce trees.) We chose a sunken yard in a rocky plateau on the southeast side of the mountain (perhaps half a mile from the summit by the path) a rod and a half wide by many more in length, with a mossy and bushy floor about five or six feet beneath the general level, where a dozen black spruce trees grew, though the surrounding rock was generally bare. There was a pretty good spring within a dozen rods, and the western wall shelved over a foot or two. We slanted two scraggy spruce trees, long since bleached, from the western wall, and, cutting many spruce boughs with our knives, made a thick bed and walls on the two sides, to keep out the wind. Then, putting several poles transversely across our two rafters, we covered them with a thick roof of spruce twigs, like shingles. The spruce, though harsh for a bed, was close at hand, we cutting away one tree to make room. We crawled under the low eaves of this roof, about eighteen inches high, and our extremities projected about a foot.
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