the river he has seen mossy timbers of the old bridge, and on the
farther bank, half hidden, the crumbling stone abutments that
supported it. In an old house upon the main road, nearly opposite the
entrance to this grassy way, I knew a hale old woman who well
remembered the gay advance of the flashing soldiers, the terrible ring
and crack of fire-arms, and the panic-stricken retreat of the
regulars, blackened and bloody. But the placid river has long since
overborne it all. The alarm, the struggle, the retreat, are swallowed
up in its supreme tranquillity. The summers of more than seventy years
have obliterated every trace of the road with thick grass, which seeks
to bury the graves, as earth buried the victims. Let the sweet ministry
of summer avail. Let its mild iteration even sap the monument and conceal
its stones as it hides the abutment in foliage; for, still on the sunny
slopes, white with the May blossoming of apple-orchards, and in the
broad fields, golden to the marge of the river, and tilled in security
and peace, survives the imperishable remembrance of that day and its
results.

The river is thus the main feature of the Concord landscape. It is
surrounded by a wide plain, from which rise only three or four low
hills. One is a wooded cliff over Fairhaven Bay, a mile from the town;
one separates the main river from the Assabeth; and just beyond the
battle-ground one rises, rich with orchards, to a fine wood which
crowns it. The river meadows blend with broad, lonely fields. A wide
horizon, like that of the prairie or the sea, is the grand charm of
Concord. At night the stars are seen from the roads crossing the
plain, as from a ship at sea. The landscape would be called tame by
those who think no scenery grand but that of mountains or the
sea-coast. But the wide solitude of that region is not so accounted by
those who live there. To them it is rich and suggestive, as Emerson