Assabet River

It has been described as a village surrounded by tracts of woodland and meadows abounding in convenient yet retired paths for walking.

The two rivers of Concord, the slow-flowing Muskettaquid and the swifter Assabet, which meet close to the north of the village, have been immortalized by both Hawthorne and Thoreau.

The sluggish artery of the Concord meadows, says the latter, steals thus unobserved through the town without a murmur or a pulse beat, its general course from southwest to northeast and its length about fifty miles, a huge volume of matter ceaselessly rolling through the plains and valleys of the substantial earth with the moccasined tread of an Indian warrior making haste from the high places of the earth to its ancient reservoir.

Footnote, introduction to The Week.

Compare Hawthorne's account in Mosses from an Old Manse.

End footnote.

As for the Assabet, we have it on Hawthorne's authority that a lovelier stream than this, for a mile above its junction with the Concord, never flowed on earth, nowhere indeed except to lave the interior regions of a poet's imagination.

Of the ponds, Walden, Sandy, and White Pond to the south of the village and Bateman's to the north are the most considerable.

In one example, he says over and over again things like this.

He says that when he goes boating or canoeing down the Assabet River, which is the river that he often was on in Concord, Massachusetts, he says, "I'm not on the Assabet.

I'm on the Ganges," or, "I'm on one of those rivers in paradise." And he's not just speaking poetically.

I think he, I think he really understands this, that he lives in myth.