[363] with the best specimens of Greek and Roman literature; yet they seem to have been utterly devoid of that poetic feeling or fancy whose subtle alchemy detects the beautiful in the familiar. Their very hymns and spiritual songs seem to have been expressly calculated, like ‘the music-grinders’ of Holmes,—
To pluck the eyes of sentiment,They were sworn enemies of the Muses; haters of stage-play literature, profane songs, and wanton sonnets; of everything, in brief, which reminded them of the days of the roistering cavaliers and bedizened beauties of the court of ‘the man Charles,’ whose head had fallen beneath the sword of Puritan justice. Hard, harsh, unlovely, yet with many virtues and noble points of character, they were fitted, doubtless, for their work of pioneers in the wilderness. Sternly faithful to duty, in peril, and suffering, and self-denial, they wrought out the noblest of historical epics on the rough soil of New England. They lived a truer poetry than Homer or Virgil wrote. The Patuckets, once a powerful native tribe, had their principal settlements around the falls at the time of the visit of the white men of Concord and Woburn in 1652. Gookin, the Indian historian, states that this tribe was almost wholly destroyed by the great pestilence of 1612. In 1674 they had but two hundred and fifty males in the whole tribe. Their chief sachem lived opposite the falls; and it
And dock the tail of rhyme,
To crack the voice of melody,
And break the legs of time.
