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Part first.

BOSTON LEGENDS.

THE SOLITARY OF SHAWMUT.

BY J. L. MOTLEY.

1628.

A SOLITARY figure sat upon the summit of Shawmut. He was a man of about thirty years of age, somewhat above the middle height, slender of form,with a pale, thoughtful face. He wore a confused dark-colored, half-canonical dress, with a gray broad-leaved hat strung with shells, like an ancient palmer's, and slouched back from his pensive brow, around which his prematurely gray hair fell in heavy curls far down upon his neck. He had a wallet at his side, a hammer in his girdle, and a long staff in his hand. The hermit of Shawmut looked out upon a scene of winning beauty. The promotory resembled rather two islands than a peninsula, although it was anchored to the continent by a long slender thread of land which seemed hardly to restrain it from floating out to join its sister islands, which were thickly strewn about the bay. The peak upon which the hermit sat was the highest of the three cliffs of the peninsula; upon the southeast, and very near him, rose another hill of lesser height and more rounded form; and upon the other side, and toward the north, a third craggy peak presented its bold and elevated front to the ocean. Thus the whole peninsula was made up of three lofty crags. It was from this triple conformation of the promotory of Shawmut that was derived the appellation of Trimountain, or Tremont, which is soon afterwards received.

The vast conical shadows were projected eastwardly, as the hermit, with his back to the declining sun, looked out upon the sea.

The bay was spread out at his feet in a broad semicircle, with its extreme headlands vanishing in the hazy distance, while beyond rolled the vast expanse of ocean, with no spot of habitable earth beyond those outermost barriers and that far distant fatherland which the exile had left forever. Not a solitary sail whitened those purple waves, and saving the wing of the seagull, which now and then flashed in the sunshine or gleamed across the dimness of the eastern horizon, the solitude was at the moment unbroken by a single movement of animated nature. An intense and breathless silence enwrapped the scene with a vast and mystic veil. The bay presented a spectacle of great beauty. It was not that the outlines of the coast around it were broken into those jagged and cloud-like masses,--that picturesque and startling scenery where precipitous crag, infinite abyss, and roaring surge unite to awkaken stern and sublime emotions; on the contrary, the gentle loveliness of this trans-atlantic scene inspired a soothing melancholy more congenial to the contemplative character of its solitary occupant. The bay, secluded within its forest-crowned hills, decorated with its necklace of emerald islands, with its dark-blue waters gilded with the rays of the western sun, and its shadowy forests of unknown antiquity expanding into infinite depths around, was an image of fresh and virgin beauty, a fitting type of a new world unadorned by art, unploughed by industry, unscathed by war,wearing none of the thousand priceless jewels of civilization, and unpolluted by its thousand crimes,--springing, as it were, from the bosom of the ocean, cool, dripping, sparkling, and fresh from the hand of its Creator.

On the left, as the pilgrim sat with his face to the east, the outlines of the coast were comparatively low, but broken into gentle and pleasing forms. Immediately at his feet lay a larger island, in extent nearly equal to the peninsula of Shawmut, covered with mighty forest-trees, and at that day untenanted by a human being, although but a short time afterwards it became the residence of a distinguished pioneer. Outside this bulwark a chain of thickly wooded islets stretched across from shore to shore, with but one or two narrow channels between, presenting a picturesque and effectual barrier to the boisterous storms of ocean. They seemed like naiads, those islets lifting above the billows their gentle heads, crowned with the budding garlands of the spring, and circling hand in hand, like protective deities, about the scene.

On the south, beyond the narrow tongue of land which bound the peninsula to the main, and which was so slender that the spray from the eastern side was often dashed across it into the calmer cove of the west, rose in the immediate distance that long, boldly broken purple-colored ridge called teh Massachusetts, or Mount Arrow Head, by the natives, and by the first English discoverer batptized the Cheviot Hills. On their left, and within the deep curve of the coast, were the slightly elevated heights of Passanogessit, or Merry Mount, an on their right stretched the broad forest, hill beyond hill, away. Towards the west and northwest, the eye wandered over a vast undulating panorama of gently rolling heights, upon whose summits the gigantic pine-forests, with their towering tops piercing the clouds, were darkly shadowed upon the western sky, while in the dim distance, far above and beyond the whole, visible only through a cloudless atmosphere, rose the airy summits of the Wachusett, Watatick, and Monadnock Mountains. Upon the inland side, at the base of the hill, the Quinobequin River, which Smith had already christened with the royal name of his unhappy patron, Charles, might be seen writhing in its slow and tortuous course, like a wounded serpent, till it lost itself in the blue and beautiful cove which spread around the while western edge of the peninsula; and within the same basin, directly opposite the northern peak of Shawmut, advanced the bold and craggy promontory of Mishawum, whre Walford, the solitary smith, had built his thatched and palisaded house. The blue thread of the River Mystic, which here mingled its waters with the Charles, gleamed for a moment beyond the heights of MIshawum, and then vanished into the frowning forest.

Such was the scene, upon a bright afternoon of spring, which spread before the eyes of the solitary, William Blaxton, the hermit of Shawmutublime image, that gentle exile in his silvan solitude. It was a simple but sublime thought, which placed him and sustained him in his lone retreat. In all ages there seem to exist men who have no appointed place in the world. They are before their age in their aspirations, above it in their contemplation, but behind it in their capacity for action. Keen to detect the follies and the inconsistencies which surround them, shrinking from the contact and the friction of the rough and boisterous world without, and building within the solitude of their meditations the airy fabric of a regenerated and purified existence, they pass their nights in unproductive study, and their days in dreams. With intelligence bright and copious enough to illuminate and to warm the chill atmosphere of the surrounding world, if the scattered rays were concentrated, but with an inability or disinclination to impress themselves upon other minds, they pass their lives without obtaining a result, and their characters, dwarfed by their distance from the actual universe, acquire an apparent indistinctness and feebleness which in reality does not belong to them.

The impending revolution in Church and State which hung like a gathering thunder-cloud above England's devoted head, was exciting to stronger spirits, whether of mischief or of virture, who rejoiced to mingle in the elemental war and to plunge into the rolling surge of the world's events; while to the timid, the hesitating, and the languid, it rose like a dark and threatening phantom, searing them into solitude, or urging them to seek repose and safety in obscurity. Thus there may be men whose spirits are in advance of their age, while still the current of the world flows rapidly past them.

Of such men, and of such instincts, was the solitary who sat on the cliffs of Shawmut. Forswearing the country of his birth and early manhood, where there seemed, in the present state of her affairs, no possibility that minds like his could develop or sustain themselves,--dropping, as it were, like a premature and unripened fruit from the bough where its blossoms ha first unfolded,--h had wandered into voluntary exile with hardly a regret. Debarred from ministering at the altar to which he had consecrated his youth, because unable to comply with mummery at which his soul revolted, he had become a high priest of nature, and had reared a pure and solitary altar in the wilderness. He had dwelt in this solitude for three or four years, and had found in the contemplation of nature, in the liberty of conscience, in solitary study and self-communing, a solace for the ills he had suffered, and a recompense for the world he had turned his back upon forever.

His spirit was a prophetic spirit, and his virtues belonged not to his times. In an age which regarded toleration as a crime, he had the courage to cultivate it as a virtue. In an age in which liberty of conscience was considered fearful licentiousness, he left his fatherland to obtain it, and was as ready to rebuke the intolerant tyranny of the nonconformist of the wilderness, as he had been to resist the bigotry and persecution of the prelacy at home. In short, the soul of the gentle hermit flew upon pure white wings before its age, but it flew, like the dove, to the wilderness. Wanting both power and inclination to act upon others, he became not a reformer, but a recluse. Having enjoyed and improved a classical education at the University of Cambridge, he was a thorough and an elegant scholar. He was likewise a profound observer, and a student of nature in all her external manifestations, and loved to theorize and to dream in the various walks of science. The botanical and mineralogical wonders of the New World were to him the objects of unceasing speculation, and he loved to proceed from the known to the unknown, and to weave fine chains of thought, which to his soaring fancy served to bind the actual to the unseen and spiritual, and upon which, as upon the celestial ladder in the patriarch's vision, he could dream that the angels of the Lord wre descending to earth from heaven.

The day was fast declining as the solitary still sat upon the peak and mused. He arose as the sun was sinking below the forest-crowned hills which girt his silvan hermitage, and gazed steadfastly towards the west.

"Another day," he said, "hath shone upon my lonely path; another day hath joined the buried ages whih have folded their wings beneath you glowing west, leaving in their noiseless flight across this virgin world no trace nor relic of their passage. 'T is strange, 't is fearful, this eternal and unbroken silence. Upon what fitful and checkered scenes hath yonder sun looked down in other lands, even in the course of this single day's career! Events as thickly studded as the stars of heaven have clustered and shone forth beneath his rays, even as his glowing chariot-wheels preformed their daily course; and here, in this mysterious and speechless world, as if a spell or enchantment lay upon it, the silence is unbroken, the whole face of nature still dewy and fresh. The step of civilization hath not adorned nor polluted the surface of this wilderness. No stately temples gleam in yonder valleys, no storied monument nor aspiring shaft pierces yonder floating clouds; no mighty cities, swarming with life, filled to bursting with the ten thousand attendants of civilized humanity, luxury and want, pampered sloth, struggling industry, disease, crime, riot, pestilence, death, all hotly pent within their narrow precincts, encumber yon sweeping plains; no peaceful villages, clinging to ancient, ivy-mantled churches; no teeming fields, spreading their vast and nourishing bosoms to the toiling thousands, meet this wandering gaze. No cheerful chime of vesperbell, no peaceful low of the returning kine, no wath-dog's bark, no merry shout of children's innocent voices, no floating music from the shepherd's pipe, no old familiar sounds of humanity, break on this listening ear. No snowy sail shines on yon eternal ocean, its blue expanse unruffled and unmarred as the azure heaven; and ah! no crimson banners flout the sky, and no embattled hosts shake with their martial tread this silent earth. 'T is silence and mystery all. Shall it ever be thus? Shall this green and beautiful world, which so long hath slept invisibly at the side of its ancient sister, still weave its virgin wreath unsoiled by passion and pollution? Shall this new, vast page in the broad history of man remain unsullied, or shall it soon flutter in the storm-winds of fate, and be stamped with the same iron record, the same dreary catalogue of misery and crime, which fills the chronicle of the elder world? 'T is passing strange, this sudden apocalypse! Lo! is it not as if the universe, the narrow universe which bounded men's thoughts in ages past, had swung open, as if by an almighty fiat, and spread wide its eastern and western wings at once, to shelter the myriads of the human race?"

The hermit arose, slowly collected a few simples which he had culled from the wilderness, a few roots of early spring flowers which he destined for his garden, and stored them in his wallet, and then, grasping his long staff, began slowly to descend the hill.