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.