Amesbury is set among the hills, Powow Hill at its back and the swift stream of the same name running from the foot of this hill through the town and going on to join the Merrimac. Amesbury is a border town--the only town of this name in the whole country, this and its neighbor Salisbury being called from the famous Amesbury and its adjacent Salisbury in England. Amesbury with the beautiful Merrimac River on its south, has on its north the rounded summits which make New Hampshire from its very beginning the land of hills. It was one of the earliest settled towns in America, receiving its name in 1667, and electing its board of “Prudenshall” the following year. From earliest times, Whittier’s own family figured largely in the annals of this region, Whittier Hill in Amesbury having been named from one of his ancestors. It was impossible that Whittier should not have deep interest in its history and legends, and in its people among whom he had intimate and dear friends. With the poet’s keen eye for beauty he saw “the winding Powow fold The green hill in its belt of gold.” He pictures on the banks of the Powow old “Cobbler Keezar” beholding through his magic lapstone the river, then “Woodsy and wild and lonesome,” changed to the day when the mighty forest was “broken by many a steepled town.” A stone’s throw from Whittier’s grave still stands the house of “Goodman Macey,” the hero of the poem, “The Exiles,” which tells his story. The haunted house in the poem, “The New Wife and the Old,” is still pointed out in Hampton, although recently it has been removed to another site, restored and inhabited by other than ghosts. “Margaret Smith’s Journal,” in his prose writings, takes the reader through the woods of Newbury giving many a picturesque incident of the life of the times--and many a touching one. “The Double-Headed Snake” is a legend of Newbury; “The Bridal of Pennacook” sketches the upper portions of the Merrimac; “The Swan Song of Parson Avery” sends its singer from the Newbury shores out beyond the bar and into the great ocean. In his songs the poet carries us along the Salisbury shore of the river to the Chain Bridge which crosses it at Deer Island, the home of Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, his contemporary, herself novelist and poet; thence up the Newbury shore to that poem of streamlets, the Artichoke, which slipping beneath the overhanging boughs of trees that all but meet across it, goes through the old mill race--Curson’s Mill--to join the Merrimac. Beyond the woods and the two rivers lies the ocean. “The Tent on the Beach” describes the long stretch of Salisbury before its invasion, first by shanties and then by hotels and casinos and cottages, transformed its picturesque solitudes. But nothing can make less magnificent the long roll of the incoming surf along its six miles of almost unbroken reach of sands. * * * * * In one of his letters Whittier says: