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CONTOOCOOK RIVER, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Of all the streams that seek the sea
Last Line: Contoocook's bright and brimming river!
Alternate Author Name(s): Dean
Subject(s): Contocook River, New Hampshire; New Hampshire


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 snowdrifts 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 their 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 meadows green?
But, flecked with foam, it speeds along;
And not the birch-tree's silvery sheen,
Nor the soft lull of murmuring pines,
Nor hermit thrushes, fluting low,
Nor ferns, nor cardinal flowers that glow
Where clematis, the fairy, twines,
Nor bowery islands where the breeze
Forever whispers to the trees,
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.
O of what beauty 'tis the giver —
Contoocook's bright and brimming river!

And on it glides, by grove and glen,
Dark woodlands, and the homes of men,
With calm and meadow, fall and mill;
Till, deep and clear, its waters fill
The channels round that gem of isles
Sacred to captives' woes and wiles,
And eager half, half eddying back,
Blend with the lordly Merrimack;
And Merrimack 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!





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