The Merrimack River: its source and its tributaries. Embracing a history of manufactures, and of the towns along its course; their geography, topography, and products, with a description of the magnificent natural scenery about its upper waters./ By J. W. Meader.

ITS SOURCE AND ITS TRIBUTARIES.
frame; when the very sweat of nature is evaporated from the oozy
pores, and leaves her products seasoned; when the loud thunders,
peal on peal, crash heavily, and bellow along the cliffs, and lightning darts in fiery forks and chains along the sky, and clouds roll
in heavy, dark masses, like trooping fiends, so angry, fierce, and
threatening; or the bright sun, rolling in unclouded splendor,- a
scene like this is beautifully grand, but nothing can excel the
gorgeous loveliness of an autumnal landscape view.
From the elevated summit of Kearsarge, when those two matchless artists, Autumn and Frost, have passed that way, and touched
the foliage with their magic brush and incomparably magnificent
coloring, the view cannot be excelled throughout the universe.
Nothing intervenes on either side to obstruct the range of vision
to the utmost limit of its power. Mountain, valley, hill, and dale,
all robed in scarlet, purple, and gold, while a flood of mellow sunlight, pouring upon the scene, illuminates the forests with all the
hues and shades of the rainbow, delighting the eye - never satiated or tiring -with the magnificent spectacle of a more than
fairy land.
Creeping unobtrusively and unobserved through the valleys, up
along each acclivity, through the great forests, and over the hilltops, the unequalled painters have touched the brush to the trailing
vine as well as shrub and bush and giant trees; nothing escapes
their attention, and now, where everything was but yesterday so uniformly green, crimson and gold and all the intervening tints adorn
the landscape. Looking to the eastward, this brilliant scene of beauty
is diversified and enhanced by the broad Merrimack meandering gently
through the wide green valley far below, like a glistening baldric,
while nature everywhere seems dressed in her liveliest and loveliest
habiliments, and in the midst of all this lavish display of splendid
variegation of adornment stands the unchanging perennial, superbly
ornamental in its sombre panoply by contrast with its gaudy surroundings. Sublime and enchanting as an autumnal scene like this
cannot fail to be, it is strange. so many greet this season sorrowfully, indulging in mitigated lamentations, and discoursing solemnly
of the "sear and yellow leaf" and "gloomy days" which "chill
the spirits and turn the heart to loneliness and sadness." Notwithstanding poets, orators, and scholars almost invariably affect
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