The National Era

LETTER FROM MAINE.—NO. 1.

To the Editor of the National Era:

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 ecstasy, 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, ready 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 minutiae 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, 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 ecstasies 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 net-work and labyrinth of islands—the sea inter penetrating 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 bareness 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 vitae.

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 movement, 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, cape-a-pe, 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 make 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 sailboats, and all make sail for some point where there is a church. They spend the day in religious services, 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 under-tones 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:

'This is the forest primeval—the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of Eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

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 from 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.

Very truly,
H. B. S.