IV.—THE WISSAHIKON.
It is a poem of everlasting beauty—a dream of magnificence—the
world-hidden, wood-embowered Wissahikon. Its pure waters break forever
in ripples of silver around the base of colossal rocks, or sweep murmuringly
on, over beds of pebbled flints, or spread into calm and mirror-like
lakes, with shores of verdure, surmounted by green hills, rolling away
in waves of forest trees, or spreading quietly in the fierce light of the summer
sun, with the tired cattle grouped beneath the lofty oaks.
It is a poem of beauty—where the breeze mourns its anthem through the
tall pines; where the silver waters send up their voices of joy; where
calmness, and quiet, and intense solitude awe the soul, and fill the heart
with bright thoughts and golden dreams, woven in the luxury of the summer
hour.
From the moment your eyes first drink in the gladness of its waters, as
they pour into the Schuylkill, seven miles from Philadelphia, until you behold
it winding its thread of silver along the meadows of Whitemarsh, many
miles above, it is all beauty, all dream, all magnificence.
It breaks on your eye, pouring into the Schuylkill, a calm lake, with an
ancient and picturesque mill[3]
in the foreground. A calm lake, buried in
the depths of towering steeps, that rise almost perpendicularly on either
side, casting a shadow of gloom over the water, while every steep is green
with brushwood, every rocky cleft magnificent with the towering oak, the
sombre pine, or the leafy chesnut.
This glen is passed; then you behold hilly shores, sloping away to the
south in pleasant undulations, while on the north arise frowning steeps.
Then your mind is awed by tremendous hills on either side, creating one
immense solitude; rugged steeps—all precipice and perpendicular rock—
covered and crowded with giant pines, and then calm and rippleless lakes,
shadowy glens, deep ravines and twilight dells of strange and dreamy
beauty.
There is, in sooth, a stamp of strange and dreamy beauty impressed
upon every ripple of the Wissahikon, every grassy bank extending greenly
along its waters, on every forest-tree towering beside its shores.
On the calm summer's day, when the sun is declining in the west, you
may look from the height of some grey, rugged steep, down upon the depths
of the world-hidden waters. Wild legends wander across your fancy as
you gaze; every scene around you seems but the fitting location for a wild
and dreamy tradition, every rock bears its old time story, every nook of the
wild wood has its tale of the ancient days. The waters, deep, calm, and
well-like, buried amidst overhanging hills, have a strange and mysterious
clearness. The long shadows of the hills, broken by golden belts of sunshine,
clothe the waters in sable and gold, in glitter and in shadow. All
around is quiet and still; silence seems to have assumed a positive existence
amid these vallies of romance and of dreams.
It was along the borders of this quiet stream, that an ancient fabric arose,
towering through the verdure of the trees, with its tottering chimneys
enveloped in folds of mist. The walls were severed by many a fissure, the
windows were crumbling to decay; the halls of the ancient mansion were
silent as the tomb.
It was wearing toward noon, when a body of soldiers, wearing the blue
hunting-shirt and fur cap with bucktail plume, came rushing from the woods
on the opposite side of the rivulet, came rushing through the waters of the
lonely stream, and hurried with hasty steps toward the deserted house.
In a moment they had entered its tottering doorway, and disappeared
within its aged walls. Another instant, and a body of soldiers broke from
the woods on the opposite side of the stream, clad in the Hessian costume,
with ponderous bearskin caps, heavy accroutements, and massive muskets.
They crossed the stream, and rushed into the house in pursuit of the
flying continentals. They searched the rooms on the first floor; they hurried
along the tottering timbers, but not a single Continental was to be seen.
They ascended the crumbling stairway with loud shouts and boisterous
oaths, and reached the rooms of the second story. Every door was flung
hastily aside, every closet was broken open, the boards were even torn from
the floor, every nook was searched, every corner ransacked, and yet no
vision of a blue shirted backwoodsman, met the eye of the eager Hessians.
All was silent as death.
Their own footfalls were returned in a thousand echoes, their own shouts
alone disturbed the silence of the house, but no sound or sight, could be obtained
of the fleeing Continentals. Every room was now searched, save
the garret, and the Hessians, some twenty men, able bodied and stout, were
about rushing up the stairway of the attic in pursuit of the ten Continental
soldiers, when the attention of one of their number was arrested by a singular
spectacle.
The Hessian soldier beheld through a crumbling window frame, the
figure of a woman, standing on the height of an abrupt steep, overhanging
the opposite side of the stream. She waved her hands to the soldier,
shouted and waved her hands again. He heeded her not, but rushed up the
stairway after his companions.
The shout of that unknown woman was the warning of death.
While the Hessians were busily engaged in searching the attic, while
their shouts and execrations awoke the echoes of the roof, while they were
thrusting sword and bayonet into the dark corners of the apartment, that
shout of the woman on the rock, arose, echoing over the stream again and
again.
The Hessians rushed to the window, they suddenly remembered that
they had neglected to search the cellar, and looking far below, they beheld
thin wreaths of light blue smoke, winding upward from the cellar window.
A fearful suspicion crept over the minds of the soldiers.
They rushed from the attic, in a moment they might reach the lower
floor and escape. With that feeling of unimaginable terror creeping round
each heart and paling every face, they rushed tremblingly on, they gained
the second floor, their footsteps already resounded along the stairway when
the boards trembled beneath their feet, a horrid combination of sounds assailed
their ears, aud the walls rocked to and fro like a frantic bacchanal.
Another moment! And along that green wood rang a fearful sound,
louder and more terrible than thunder, shaking the very rocks with an earth-quake
motion, while the fragments of the ancient fabric arose blackening
into the heavens, mingled with human bodies torn and scattered into innumerable
pieces, and the air was filled with a dense smoke, that hung over
the forest, in one thick and blackening pall.
In a few moments the scene was clear, but the ancient house had disappeared
as if by magic, while the shouts of the Continental soldiers were
heard in the woods, far beyond the scene.
The house had been used by the British as a temporary depot of powder.
When the American Continentals rushed into the cellar, they beheld the
kegs standing in one corner, they piled up combustible matter in its vicinity
and then made their escape from the house by a subterranean passage
known only to themselves. They emerged into open air some hundred
yards beyond, and beheld the result of this signal vengeance on their foes.
