University of Virginia Library

Letter From Maine.—No. 1.

The fashionable complaint of neuralgia has kept
back from your paper many “thoughts, motions,
and revolutions” of the brain, which, could they
have printed themselves on paper, would have
found their way towards you. Don't you suppose,
in the marvellous progress of this fast-living age,
the time will ever come, when, by some metaphysical
daguerreotype process, the thoughts and images
of the brain shall print themselves on paper,
without the intervention of pen and ink? Then,
how many brilliancies, now lost and forgotten before
one gets time to put them through the slow
process of writing, shall flash upon us! Our poets
will sit in luxurious ease, with a quire of paper in
their pockets, and have nothing to do but lean
back in their chairs, and go off in an ecstacy, and
lo! they will find it all written out, commas and
all, ready for the printer. What a relief, too, to

multitudes of gentle hearts, whose friends in this
busy age are too hurried to find much time for
writing. Your merchant puts a sheet of paper inside
of his vest—over his heart, of course—and in
the interval between selling goods and pricing
stocks, thinks warm thoughts towards his wife or
lady-love—and at night draws forth a long letter,
all directed for the post. How convenient!
Would that some friend of humanity would offer a
premium for the discovery!

The spiritual rapping fraternity, who are au fait
in all that relates to man's capabilities, and who
are now speaking ex cathedra of all things celestial
and terrestrial, past, present, and to come, can
perhaps immediately settle the minutiæ of such an
arrangement. One thing is quite certain: that
if every man wore a sheet of paper in his bosom,
on which there should be a true and literal version
of all his thoughts, even for one day, in a
great many cases he would be astounded on reading
it over. Are there not many who would there
see, in plain, unvarnished English, what their
patriotism, disinterestedness, generosity, friendship,
and religion actually amounts to? Let us
fancy some of our extra patriotic public men comparing

such a sheet with their speeches. We
have been amused, sometimes, at the look of blank
astonishment with which men look for the first
time on their own daguerreotype. Is that me?
Do I look so? Perhaps this inner daguerreotype
might prove more surprising still. “What,
I think that? I purpose so—and so? What
a troublesome ugly machine! I'll have nothing
to do with it!”

But to drop that subject, and start another. It
seems to us quite wonderful, that in all the ecstacies
that have been lavished on American scenery,
this beautiful State of Maine should have been
so much neglected; for nothing is or can be
more wildly, peculiarly beautiful—particularly the
scenery of the sea-coast. A glance at the map
will show one the peculiarity of these shores. It
is a complicated network and labyrinth of islands—
the sea interpenetrating the land in every fanciful
form, through a belt of coast from fifteen to
twenty miles wide. The effect of this, as it lies
on the map, and as it lives and glows in reality,
is as different as the difference between the poetry
of life and its dead matter of fact.

But supposing yourself almost anywhere in

Maine, within fifteen miles of the shore, and you
start for a ride to the sea side, you will then be in
a fair way to realize it. The sea, living, beautiful,
and life-giving, seems, as you ride, to be
everywhere about you—behind, before, around.
Now it rises like a lake, gemmed with islands, and
embosomed by rich swells of woodland. Now
you catch a peep of it on your right hand, among
tufts of oak and maple, and anon it spreads on
your left to a majestic sheet of silver, among rocky
shores, hung with dark pines, hemlocks, and
spruces.

The sea shores of Connecticut and Massachusetts
have a kind of baldness and barenness which
you never see here. As you approach the ocean
there, the trees seem to become stunted and few
in number, but here the sea luxuriates, swells, and
falls, in the very lap of the primeval forest.
The tide water washes the drooping branches of
the oak and maple, and dashes itself up into whole
hedges of luxuriant arbor vitæ.

No language can be too enthusiastic to paint the
beauty of the evergreens in these forests The
lordly spruce, so straight, so tall, so perfectly defined
in its outline, with its regal crest of cones,

sparkling with the clear exuded gum, and bearing
on its top that “silent finger” which Elliot describes
as “ever pointing up to God”—the ancient
white pine with its slender whispering leaves, the
feathery larches, the rugged and shaggy cedars—
all unite to form such a “goodly fellowship,” that
one is inclined to think for the time that no son
of the forest can compare with them. But the
spruce is the prince among them all. Far or
near, you see its slender obelisk of dark green,
rising singly amid forests of oak or maple, or marshalled
together in serried ranks over distant hills,
or wooding innumerable points, whose fantastic
outlines interlace the silvery sea. The heavy
blue green of these distant pines forms a beautiful
contrast to the glitter of the waters, and affords a
fine background, to throw out the small white
wings of sail boats, which are ever passing from
point to point among these bays and harbors.
One of the most peculiar and romantic features
of these secluded wood-embosomed waters of
Maine is this sudden apparition of shipping and
sea craft, in such wild and lonely places, that they
seem to you, as the first ships did to the simple
savages, to be visitants from the spirit land.
You are riding in a lonely road, by some bay that
seems to you like a secluded inland lake; you check
your horse, to notice the fine outline of the various
points, when lo! from behind one of them,
swan-like, with wings all spread, glides in a ship
from India or China, and wakes up the silence, by
tumbling her great anchor into the water. A
ship, of itself a child of romance—a dreamy, cloud-like,
poetic thing—and that ship connects these
piney hills and rocky shores, these spruces and
firs, with distant lands of palm and spice, and
speaks to you, in these solitudes, of groves of
citron and olive. We pray the day may never
come when any busy Yankee shall find a substitute
for ship sails, and take from these spirits of
the wave their glorious white wings, and silent,
cloud-like movements, for any fuss and sputter of
steam and machinery. It will be just like some
Yankee to do it. That race will never rest till
everything antique and poetic is drilled out of the
world. The same spirit which yearns to make
Niagara a mill-seat, and use all its pomp and
power of cloud, and spray, and rainbow, and its
voices of many waters, for accessories to a cotton
factory, would, we suppose, be right glad to transform
the winged ship into some disagreeable
greasy combination of machinery, if it would only
come cheaper. The islands along the coast of
Maine are a study for a tourist. The whole sail
along the shores is through a never ending
labyrinth of these—some high and rocky, with
castellated sides, bannered with pines—some richly
wooded with forest trees—and others, again,
whose luxuriant meadow land affords the finest
pasturage for cattle. Here are the cottages of
fishermen, who divide their time between farming
and fishing, and thus between land and water
make a very respectable amphibious living. These
people are simple-hearted, kindly, hardy, with a
good deal of the genial broad-heartedness that
characterizes their old father, the ocean. When
down on one of these lonely islands once, we
were charmed to find, in a small cottage, one of
the prettiest and most lady-like of women. Her
husband owned a fishing-smack; and while we
were sitting conversing in the house, in came a
damsel from the neighborhood, arrayed, in all
points, cap-a-pie, according to the latest city
fashions. The husband came home from a trip
while we were there. He had stopped in Portland,
and brought home a new bonnet for his wife, of
the most approved style, and a pair of gaiter
shoes for his little girl. One of our company was
talking with him, congratulating him on his retired
situation.

“You can go all about, trading in your vessel,
and making money,” he said, “and here on this
retired island there is no way to spend it, so you
must lay up a good deal.”

“Don't know about that,” said the young man;
“there's women and girls everywhere; and they
must have their rings, and their pins, and parasols
and ribbons. There's ways enough for money
to go.”

On Sunday mornings, these islanders have out
their sail-boats, and all make sail for some point
where there is a church. They spend the day in
religious service, and return at evening. Could
one wish a more picturesque way of going to
meeting of a calm summer morning?

So beautiful a country, one would think, must
have nurtured the poetic sentiment; and Maine,
accordingly, has given us one of our truest poets—
Longfellow. Popular as his poetry is, on a first
reading, it is poetry that improves and grows on

one by acquaintance and study; and more particularly
should be studied under the skies and
by the seas of that State whose beauty first inspired
it. No one who views the scenery of
Maine artistically, and then studies the poems
of Longfellow, can avoid seeing that its hues and
tones, its beautiful word-painting, and the exquisite
variety and smoothness of its cadences, have been
caught, not from books and study, but from a
long and deep heart communion with Nature.
We recollect seeing with some indignation, a few
years ago, what seemed to us a very captious criticism
on Longfellow; and it simply occurred to
us then, that if the critic had spent as much time
in the forest as the poet, and become as familiar
with the fine undertones of Nature, such a critique
never would have appeared. A lady who has
lately been rambling with us among the scenery
of Maine, and reading Longfellow's poems, said,
the other day—“He must have learned his measure
from the sea; there is just its beautiful ripple
in all his verses”—a very beautiful and very just
criticism. There are some fine lines in Evangeline,
that give us the pine forests of Maine like a
painting:

Drawn to the very life! We have seen those
very Druids—graybeards, dusky garments and
all, on the shores of Maine, many a time; and if
anybody wants to feel the beauty and grandeur
of the picture, he must go to some of those wild
rocky islands there.

Longfellow's poetry has the true seal of the
bard in this: that while it is dyed rich as an old
cathedral window in tints borrowed in foreign
language and literature—tints caught in the fields
of Spain, Italy, and Germany—yet, after all, the
strong dominant colors are from fields and scenes
of home. So truly is he a poet of Maine, that we
could wish to see his poems in every fisherman's
cottage, through all the wild islands, and among

all the romantic bays and creeks of that beautiful
shore.

It would be a fine critical study to show how
this undertone of native imagery and feeling
passes through all that singular harmony which
the poet's scholarcraft has enabled him to compose
from the style of many nations; and some day
we have it in heart to do this in a future letter.
At present we will not bestow any further tediousness
upon you.