The Westminster Review reviews A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:
An exceedingly pleasant narrative of a week’s boating excursion upon the waters of two rivers, whose very existence, perhaps, is all unknown to the majority of the dwellers on this side of the Atlantic. The author is evidently one who has read much, and thought much,—a keen observer and lover of nature, and one whom we could gladly journey with, amid the scenery described in this volume. Notwithstanding occasional attempts at fine writing, and some rather long-winded disquisitions upon religion, literature, and other matters,—sometimes naturally arising from the incidents of the voyage, sometimes lugged in apparently without rhyme or reason,—the book is an agreeable book and all the irrelevant matter may be skipped by those who don’t like it, while such as prefer this kind of reading to the narrative portions, may revel in it to their heart’s content; and so may each class of readers find something to suit them in these pages.
We know not if the following choice morceau be original or select; it figures as one of the three mottoes at the beginning of the book, each having a page devoted to itself, a significant hint, perhaps, of the absence of “taxes on knowledge” across the Atlantic:—
New lands, new people, and new thoughts to find;
Many fair reaches and headlands appeared,
And many dangers were there to be feared;
But when I remember where I have been,
And the fair landscapes that I have seen,
THOU seemest the only permanent shore,
The cape never rounded, nor wandered o’er.”
As a set-off we give a sample of the prose, in the following description of a bivouac on the banks of a river, which makes one long to be of such a party.
The voyageurs are two brothers, who, in a boat of their own building, weighed anchor in the river port of Concord, U. S., “on Saturday, the last day of August, 1839.” A tranquil voyage, with but few incidents, bring them, on Monday evening, to their halting-place, which is thus described:—[quote from page 177: “Soon the village of Nashua was out of sight . . . ”]
We shall be glad to meet our author again, as soon as his ‘Day in the Woods,’ which we see announced as nearly ready, shall have reached England; for we may as well intimate, before we conclude, that the present volume is a native of Boston, U.S., having been introduced to this country by a spirited publisher, to whom the English reader is already under considerable obligation.
