But coming soon to higher land, which afforded a
prospect of the mountains, we thought we had not travelled in vain, if it
were only to hear a truer and wilder pronunciation of their names, from
the lips of the inhabitants; not _Way_-tatic, _Way_-chusett, but
_Wor_-tatic, _Wor_-chusett. It made us ashamed of our tame and civil
pronunciation, and we looked upon them as born and bred farther west than
we. Their tongues had a more generous accent than ours, as if breath was
cheaper where they wagged. A countryman, who speaks but seldom, talks
copiously, as it were, as his wife sets cream and cheese before you
without stint. Before noon we had reached the highlands overlooking the
valley of Lancaster, (affording the first fair and open prospect into the
west,) and there, on the top of a hill, in the shade of some oaks, near to
where a spring bubbled out from a leaden pipe, we rested during the heat
of the day, reading Virgil, and enjoying the scenery. It was such a place
as one feels to be on the outside of the earth, for from it we could, in
some measure, see the form and structure of the globe. There lay
Wachusett, the object of our journey, lowering upon us with unchanged
proportions, though with a less ethereal aspect than had greeted our
morning gaze, while further north, in successive order, slumbered its
sister mountains along the horizon.
We could get no further into the Aeneid than
--atque altae moenia Romae,
--and the wall of high Rome,
before we were constrained to reflect by what myriad tests a work of
genius has to be tried; that Virgil, away in Rome, two thousand years off,
should have to unfold his meaning, the inspiration of Italian vales, to
the pilgrim on New England hills. This life so raw and modern, that so
civil and ancient; and yet we read Virgil, mainly to be reminded of the
identity of human nature in all ages, and, by the poet's own account, we
are both the children of a late age, and live equally under the reign of
Jupiter.
"He shook honey from the leaves, and removed fire,
And stayed the wine, everywhere flowing in rivers;
That experience, by meditating, might invent various arts
By degrees, and seek the blade of corn in furrows,
And strike out hidden fire from the veins of the flint."
The old world stands serenely behind the new, as one mountain yonder
towers behind another, more dim and distant. Rome imposes her story still
upon this late generation. The very children in the school we had that
morning passed, had gone through her wars, and recited her alarms, ere
they had heard of the wars of neighboring Lancaster. The roving eye still
rests inevitably on her hills, and she still holds up the skirts of the
sky on that side, and makes the past remote.
The lay of the land hereabouts is well worthy the attention of the
traveller. The hill on which we were resting made part of an extensive
range, running from southwest to northeast, across the country, and
separating the waters of the Nashua from those of the Concord, whose banks
we had left in the morning; and by bearing in mind this fact, we could
easily determine whither each brook was bound that crossed our path.
Parallel to this, and fifteen miles further west, beyond the deep and
broad valley in which lie Groton, Shirley, Lancaster, and Boylston, runs
the Wachusett range, in the same general direction.
