I might give a long, and even interesting, account of my journey up the Hudson; but such is not my intention. There are already numerous books of travel extant, which describe the Hudson as well as it can be described in words. My object is to amuse; and if I relate all the funny things that happened to me, I shall succeed. I might describe the view of the Catskill Mountains, the towns of Hudson, Peekskill, Newburg, West Point, etc., but will leave that to tourists, as already hinted.
But I must not pass by without mentioning one or two points on the Hudson. The Catskill Mountains, viewed from the river, present so lovely a picture that neither pen nor brush can convey any adequate idea of them. No one should live and die without viewing such scenery as this.
A few miles above West Point, and on the same shore of the river—the western—rises a mountain peak called the Crow Nest. Joseph Rodman Drake, an American poet who died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five, thus exquisitely depicts this delightful region, in his poem entitled, “The Culprit Fay:”
“’Tis the middle watch of a summer’s night—
The earth is dark, but the heavens are bright;
Nought is seen in the vault on high,
But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky,
And the flood which rolls its milky hue,
A river of light on the welkin blue.
The moon looks down on old Crow Nest,