In 1791 there came up a question of a bridge being built across the
Merrimac. A town meeting was called to oppose the measure, and in this
it was argued that a bridge would throw into disuse the ferry with which
much pains had been taken. Precious old fogies! In those days, too, they
lived, for they were as old as the centuries. Nothing of the mushroom
about them. There is a tradition that once in Revolutionary days,
Washington was carried across this ferry. But it is impossible to say
what the tradition is founded upon, and how much it is worth.

As to the river, there are rivers and rivers, as the saying is; at some
we marvel, some we fear and to some we make pilgrimages as to the Mecca
of the faithful. But the Merrimac is a river to be loved, and to be
loved the better the more familiar it is. What its poet, Whittier, says
about it must be literally true:

"Our river by its valley born
Was never yet forgotten."

It is worth while to try to imagine it as he writes it in "Cobbler
Keezer's Vision" two hundred and more years ago, when that old fellow
was so amazed at the prospect of mirth and pleasure among the
descendants of the stern Puritans that he dropped his lapstone into the
water in bewilderment.

This was the time when

"Woodsy and wild and lonesome,
The swift stream wound away,
Through birches and scarlet maples
Flashing in foam and spray."

"Down on the sharp-horned ledges
Plunging in steep cascade,
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. Thi