Passing up the street by the Hospital, a large and elegant mansion
surrounded by trees and shrubbery and climbing vines, I found myself,
after walking a few rods farther, in full view of the Merrimac. A deep
and rocky channel stretched between me and the Dracut shore, along which
rushed the shallow water,--a feeble, broken, and tortuous current,
winding its way among splintered rocks, rising sharp and jagged in all
directions. Drained above the falls by the canal, it resembled some
mountain streamlet of old Spain, or some Arabian wady, exhausted by a
year's drought. Higher up, the arches of the bridge spanned the quick,
troubled water; and, higher still, the dam, so irregular in its outline
as to seem less a work of Art than of Nature, crossed the bed of the
river, a lakelike placidity above contrasting with the foam and murmur
of the falls below. And this was all which modern improvements had left
of "the great Patucket Falls" of the olden time. The wild river had
been tamed; the spirit of the falls, whose hoarse voice the Indian once
heard in the dashing of the great water down the rocks, had become the
slave of the arch conjurer, Art; and, like a shorn and blinded giant,
was grinding in the prison-house of his taskmaster.

One would like to know how this spot must have seemed to the "twenty
goodlie persons from Concord and Woburn" who first visited it in 1652,
as, worn with fatigue, and wet from the passage of the sluggish Concord,
"where ford there was none," they wound their slow way through the
forest, following the growing murmur of the falls, until at length the
broad, swift river stretched before them, its white spray flashing in
the sun. What cared these sturdy old Puritans for the wild beauty of
the landscape thus revealed before them? I think I see them standing
there in the golden light of a closing October day, with their sombre
brown doublets and slouched hats, and their heavy matchlocks,--such men