His pale face flushed from eye to beard,
With nervous cough his throat he cleared,
And, in a voice so tremulous it betrayed
The anxious fondness of an author's heart, he read:
. . . . .
THE WRECK OF RIVERMOUTH
The Goody Cole who figures in this poem and The Changeling as
Eunice Cole, who for a quarter of a century or more was feared,
persecuted, and hated as the witch of Hampton. She lived alone in a
hovel a little distant from the spot where the Hampton Academy now
stands, and there she died, unattended. When her death was
discovered, she was hastily covered up in the earth near by, and a
stake driven through her body, to exorcise the evil spirit. Rev.
Stephen Bachiler or Batchelder was one of the ablest of the early
New England preachers. His marriage late in life to a woman
regarded by his church as disreputable induced him to return to
England, where he enjoyed the esteem and favor of Oliver Cromwell
during the Protectorate.
Rivermouth Rocks are fair to see,
By dawn or sunset shone across,
When the ebb of the sea has left them free,
To dry their fringes of gold-green moss
For there the river comes winding down,
From salt sea-meadows and uplands brown,
And waves on the outer rocks afoam
Shout to its waters, "Welcome home!"
And fair are the sunny isles in view
East of the grisly Head of the Boar,
And Agamenticus lifts its blue
Disk of a cloud the woodlands o'er;
And southerly, when the tide is down,
'Twixt white sea-waves and sand-hills brown,
The beach-birds dance and the gray gulls wheel
Over a floor of burnished steel.
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