Rev. William Wilberforce Newton.
and near gathered for a whiff of their native mountain air and to drink deep of the, springs of their youth. At this festival many took part. There was Johnsonian Dr. Todd of Pittsfield, orthodox minister and author, whom Longfellow, in "Kavanagh," sends to slay the deer. There were Mrs. Kemble, Macready, the English actor, Mrs. Sigourney, who read a poem on "The Stockbridge Bowl," and William Pitt Palmer, Berkshire born and bred. Dr. Mark Hopkins preached the sermon, beginning with the characteristically terse and memorable words, "And this is the Berkshire Jubiiee." It was reserved for Dr. Holmes, in response to invitation, to read the poem which has since become familiar:—
"Come back to your mother, ye children, for
shame,
Who have wandered like truants for riches or
fame!"
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The reading of this poem, said one who heard it, was in tones so clear, so silvery, so refined, that it seemed as if the poet from his infant days had never mispronounced a word. It certainly has the swing and personality and manly bubbling wit of its happy author.
But best of all his Berkshire productions is the poem called "The Ploughman," which appeared a few years later, in 1849. It is a georgic. What a picture— this brown furrowed field with its freshly upturned sod and its soil bright and mellow along the hillsides, but darker, moister, and clinging in the gentle depressions between! Up and down, over knoll and valley, toils the smoking team, followed by its sturdy guide.
"Lo! on he comes, behind his smoking team,
With toil's bright dewdrops on his sunburnt
brow,
The lord of earth, the hero of the plough!"
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It reminds one of Millet's grand pictures of seedtime or harvest. It smacks of the soil, —of American soil and freedom. It is vigorous and muscular and manly, and worthily one of the author's own favorites.
Quite away from Stockbridge, Lenox, and Pittsfield, we find Thoreau, on foot, alone, thoughtful, in the forest upon the summit of Greylock. Indeed, where but in solitude should we expect to find him? He confessed he had an appetite for solitude, as an infant for sleep. His "Sunrise upon Greylock" was only one excursion of a life of excursions. To him walking was second nature. One may picture him stopping at North Adams to buy rice, sugar, and a tin cup for his knapsack, and then making his way up the Bellows Pipe and Notch Brook, Greylock bound. If in his usual costume, he was clad in straw hat, rough,
The Field Place, Stockbridge.
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