Glow'd with the omens of a tempest near;"
Yet I ventured to stroll out to East Rock, two miles east-northeast of the city. Crossing the bridge at the factory owned by the late Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin that bears his name, I toiled up the steep slope through the woods to the summit of the rock,
East Rock.—View from its Summit.—Quinnipiack.—Settlement of New Haven.
nearly four hundred feet above the plain below. This rock is the southern extremity of the Mount Tom range of hills. It lies contiguous to a similar amorphous mass called West Rock, and both are composed principally of hornblende and feldspar, interspersed with quartz and iron. The oxyd of iron, by the action of rains, covers their bare and almost perpendicular fronts, and gives them their red appearance, which caused the Dutch anciently to designate the site of New Haven by the name of Red Rock. The fronts of these rocks are composed of assemblages of vast irregular columns, similar in appearance to the Palisades of the Hudson, and, like them, having great beds of debris at their bases. A view from either will repay the traveler for his labor in reaching the summit. That from the East Rock is particularly attractive, for it embraces the harbor, city, plain, and almost every point of historical interest connected with New Haven, or Quinnipiack, as the Indians called it
"I stood upon the cliff's extremest edge,
And downward far beneath me could I see
Complaining brooks that played with meadow sedge,
Then brightly wandered on their journey free."
Willis Gaylord Clarke.
Winding through the plain were Mill River and the Quinnipiack, spanned by noble bridges near the city that lay stretched along the beautiful bay; and