Of all the streams that seek the sea
By mountain pass, or sunny lea,
Now where is one that dares to vie
With clear Contoocook, swift and shy?
Monadnock's child, of snow-drifts born,
The snows of many a winter morn,
And many a midnight dark and still,
Heaped higher, whiter, day by day,
To melt, at last, with suns of May,
And steal in tiny fall and rill,
Down the long slopes of granite gray:
Or, filter slow through seam and cleft,
When frost and storm the rock have reft,
To bubble cool in sheltered springs
Where the lone red-bird dips his wings,
And the tired fox that gains its brink
Stoops, safe from hound and horn, to drink.
And rills and springs, grown broad and deep,
Unite through gorge and glen to sweep
In roaring brooks that turn and take
The over-floods of pool and lake,
Till, to the fields, the hills deliver
Contoocook's bright and brimming river!
O have you seen, from Hillsboro' town
How fast its tide goes hurrying down,
With rapids now, and now a leap
Past giant boulders, black and steep,
Plunged in mid water, fain to keep
Its current from the meadow green?
But, flecked with foam, it speeds along;
And not the birch trees' silvery sheen,
Nor the soft lull of whispering pines,
Nor hermit thrushes, fluting low,
Nor ferns, nor cardinal flowers that glow
Where clematis, the fairy, twines,
Can stay its course, or still its song;
Ceaseless it flows till, round its bed,
The vales of Henniker are spread,
Their banks all set with golden grain,
Or stately trees whose vistas gleam–
A double forest in the stream;
And, winding 'neath the pine-crowned hill
That overhangs the village plain,
By sunny reaches, broad and still,
It nears the bridge that spans its tide–
The bridge whose arches low and wide
It ripples through–and should you lean
A moment there, no lovelier scene
On England's Wye, or Scotland's Tay
Would charm your gaze a summer's day.
And on it glides, by grove and glen,
Dark woodlands and the homes of men,
With now a ferry, now a mill:
Till, deep and calm, its waters fill
The channels round that gem of isles
Sacred to captives' woes and wiles,
And, gleeful half, half eddying back.
Blend with the lordly Merrimac:
And Merrimac whose tide is strong
Rolls gently, with its waves along,
Monadnock's stream that, coy and fair,
Has come, its larger life to share,
And, to the sea, doth safe deliver
Contoocook's bright and brimming river!
Source: The Cambridge Book of Poetry And Song: by Charlotte Fiske Bates; T.Y. Crowell & Co; 1910, page 449. — Poem by Edna Dean Proctor.
