Tales and Sketches: Part 3 from Volume V of The Works of John Greenleaf WhittierWhittier, John Greenleaf
General
Tales and Sketches: Part 3 from Volume V of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier
Whittier, John Greenleaf
American literature
This latter waterfall is now somewhat modified by
the hand of Art, but is still, as Professor Hitchcock's "Scenographical
Geology" says of it, "an object of no little interest." My friend T.,
favorably known as the translator of "Undine" and as a writer of fine
and delicate imagination, visited Spicket Falls before the sound of a
hammer or the click of a trowel had been heard beside them. His journal
of "A Day on the Merrimac" gives a pleasing and vivid description of
their original appearance as viewed through the telescope of a poetic
fancy. The readers of "Undine" will thank me for a passage or two from
this sketch:--
"The sound of the waters swells more deeply. Something supernatural in
their confused murmur; it makes me better understand and sympathize with
the writer of the Apocalypse when he speaks of the voice of many waters,
heaping image upon image, to impart the vigor of his conception.
"Through yonder elm-branches I catch a few snowy glimpses of foam in the
air. See that spray and vapor rolling up the evergreen on my left The
two side precipices, one hundred feet apart and excluding objects of
inferior moment, darken and concentrate the view. The waters between
pour over the right-hand and left-hand summit, rushing down and uniting
among the craggiest and abruptest of rocks. Oh for a whole mountain-
side of that living foam! The sun impresses a faint prismatic hue.
These falls, compared with those of the Missouri, are nothing,--nothing
but the merest miniature; and yet they assist me in forming some
conception of that glorious expanse.
"A fragment of an oak, struck off by lightning, struggles with the
current midway down; while the shattered trunk frowns above the
desolation, majestic in ruin. This is near the southern cliff. Farther
north a crag rises out of the stream, its upper surface covered with
green clover of the most vivid freshness. Not only all night, but all
day, has the dew lain upon its purity. With my eye attaining the
uppermost margin, where the waters shoot over, I look away into the
western sky, and discern there (what you least expect) a cow chewing her
cud with admirable composure, and higher up several sheep and lambs
browsing celestial buds. They stand on the eminence that forms the
background of my present view. The illusion is extremely picturesque,--
such as Allston himself would despair of producing. 'Who can paint like
Nature'? "
To a population like that of Lowell, the weekly respite from monotonous
in-door toil afforded by the first day of the week is particularly
grateful. Sabbath comes to the weary and overworked operative
emphatically as a day of rest. It opens upon him somewhat as it did
upon George Herbert, as he describes it in his exquisite little poem:--
"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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