Down to the sea, some seventeen miles away, winds the beautiful Merrimack, with the deep-shaded old town of Newburyport seated at its mouth. A little more than half way down lies Amesbury, just where the winding Powwow joins the Merrimack, but not before its nixies and river-horses have been compelled to put their shoulders to the wheels of several huge cotton mills that lift their forbidding bulk out of the very centre of the village. A horse-railroad connects Amesbury with Newburyport, six miles distant. At about half that distance the road crosses the Merrimack by way of Deer Island and connecting bridges. The sole house on this wild, rough island is the home of the Spoffords.
As you near Newburyport, coming down from Amesbury, you see the river widened into an estuary, and bordered by wide and intensely green salt-meadows. Numerous large vessels lie at the wharves, a "gundelow," with lateen sail, creeps slowly down the current; the draw of the railroad bridge is perhaps opening for the passage of a tug, and out at sea athwart the river's mouth--
"Long and low, with dwarf trees crowned, Plum Island lies, like a whale aground, A stone's toss over the narrow sound."
Far off to the left lie Salisbury and Hampton beaches, celebrated by Whittier in his poems "Hampton Beach," "Snow-Bound," and "The Tent on the Beach":--
"Where Salisbury's level marshes spread Mile-wide as flies the laden bee; Where merry mowers, hale and strong, Swept, scythe on scythe, their swaths along The low green prairies of the sea."
Standing on the sand-ridge by the beach, you have before you the washing surf, and miles on miles of level sand, rimmed with creeping, silver water-lace, overhung here and there by thinnest powdery mist. Out at sea the waves are tossing their salt-threaded manes, or flinging the sunlight from their supple coats--(æonian roar; white-haired, demoniac shapes)--while at evening you see far away to the northeast the revolving light of the Isles of Shoals.
"Quail and sandpiper and swallow and sparrow are here; Sweet sound their manifold notes, high and low, far and near; Chorus of musical waters, the rush of the breeze, Steady and strong from the south,--what glad voices are these!"