I Have Passed Down This Portion Of The River In A Steamboat, And It Was A Pleasant Sight To Watch From Its Deck The Fishermen Dragging Their Seines On The Distant Shore, As In Pictures Of A Foreign Strand.

At intervals you may meet with a schooner laden with lumber, standing up to Haverhill, or else lying at

Anchor or aground, waiting for wind or tide; until, at last, you glide under the famous Chain Bridge, and are landed at Newburyport. Thus she who at first was "poore of waters, naked of renowne," having received so many fair tributaries, as was said of the Forth,

"Doth grow the greater still, the further downe; Till that abounding both in power and fame, She long doth strive to give the sea her name";

or if not her name, in this case, at least the impulse of her stream. From the steeples of Newburyport you may review this river stretching far up into the country, with many a white sail glancing over it like an inland sea, and behold, as one wrote who was born on its head-waters, "Down out at its mouth, the dark inky main blending with the blue above. Plum Island, its sand ridges scolloping along the horizon like the sea-serpent, and the distant outline broken by many a tall ship, leaning, _still_, against the sky."

Rising at an equal height with the Connecticut, the Merrimack reaches the sea by a course only half as long, and hence has no leisure to form broad and fertile meadows, like the former, but is hurried along rapids, and down numerous falls, without long delay.

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