Page:A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.djvu/188

182 There every virtue has its birth,

Ere it descends upon the earth,

And thither every deed returns,

Which in the generous bosom burns.

There love is warm, and youth is young,

And poetry is yet unsung,

For Virtue still adventures there,

And freely breathes her native air.

And ever, if you hearken well,

You still may hear its vesper bell,

And tread of high-souled men go by,

Their thoughts conversing with the sky.

According to Jamblichus, "Pythagoras did not procure for himself a thing of this kind through instruments or the voice, but employing a certain ineffable divinity, and which it is difficult to apprehend, he extended his ears and fixed his intellect in the sublime symphonies of the world, he alone hearing and understanding, as it appears, the universal harmony and consonance of the spheres, and the stars that are moved through them, and which produce a fuller and more intense melody than any thing effected by mortal sounds."

Travelling on foot very early one morning due east from here about twenty miles, from Caleb Harriman's tavern in Hampstead toward Haverhill, when I reached the railroad in Plaistow, I heard at some distance a faint music in the air like an Æolian harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was so. It was the telegraph harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not by men but by gods. Perchance,