Far behind was Ocean striving
With his chains of sand;
Southward, sunny glimpses giving,
’Twixt the swells of land,
Of its calm and silvery track,
Rolled the tranquil Merrimac.
Over village, wood, and meadow
Gazed that stranger man,
Sadly, till the twilight shadow
Over all things ran,
Save where spire and westward pane
Flashed the sunset back again.
Gazing thus upon the dwelling
Of his warrior sires,
Where no lingering trace was telling
Of their wigwam fires,
Who the gloomy thoughts might know
Of that wandering child of woe?
Naked lay, in sunshine glowing,
Hills that once had stood
Down their sides the shadows throwing
Of a mighty wood,
Where the deer his covert kept,
And the eagle’s pinion swept!
Where the birch canoe had glided
Down the swift Powow,
Dark and gloomy bridges strided
Those clear waters now;
And where once the beaver swam,
Jarred the wheel and frowned the dam.
For the wood-bird’s merry singing,
And the hunter’s cheer,
Iron clang and hammer’s ringing
Smote upon his ear;
And the thick and sullen smoke
From the blackened forges broke.
Could it be his fathers ever
Loved to linger here?
These bare hills, this conquered river,—
Could they hold them dear,
With their native loveliness
Tamed and tortured into this?
Sadly, as the shades of even
Gathered o’er the hill,
While the western half of heaven
Blushed with sunset still,
From the fountain’s mossy seat
Turned the Indian’s weary feet.
Year on year hath flown forever,
But he came no more
To the hillside on the river
Where he came before.
But the villager can tell
Of that strange man’s visit well.
And the merry children, laden
With their fruits or flowers,
Roving boy and laughing maiden,
In their school-day hours,
Love the simple tale to tell
Of the Indian and his well.
1837
The village of Haverhill, on the Merrimac, called
by the Indians Pentucket, was for nearly seventeen
years a frontier town, and during thirty years endured
all the horrors of savage warfare. In the year
1708, a combined body of French and Indians, under
the command of De Chaillons, and Hertel de Rouville,
the famous and bloody sacker of Deerfield, made an
attack upon the village, which at that time contained
only thirty houses. Sixteen of the villagers were
massacred, and a still larger number made prisoners.
About thirty of the enemy also fell, among them Hertel
de Rouville. The minister of the place, Benjamin
Rolfe, was killed by a shot through his own door.
In a paper entitled The Border War of 1708, published
in my collection of Recreations and Miscellanies,
I have given a prose narrative of the surprise of Haverhill.
