Winds through the hills afar,
Old Cro' Nest like a monarch stands
Crowned with a single star."
Up the Hudson from the Water Battery, West Point
The northern portal of the Highlands is guarded on either hand by the Storm King, rising fifteen hundred and twenty-nine feet, and Mount Taurus, fifteen hundred and eighty-six feet. There are also a galaxy of attendant peaks. Beyond Mount Taurus is Breakneck Hill, rising nearly twelve hundred feet, with a chain of mountains stretching far to the northeast, among them the Old Beacon and the towering Grand Sachem, sixteen hundred and eighty feet high. The Storm King was the old Boter-Berg of the early Dutch, thus named because, to their matter-of-fact minds, the mountain resembled nothing so much as a huge lump of butter. Similarly, the eastern portal of the pass was Bull Mountain originally, but has since been more classically transformed into Mount Taurus. The ancient Knickerbocker legend records how the primitive inhabitants chased a wild bull around this mountain to the peak beyond it, where he fell and broke his neck, thus naming both of them, though Breakneck Hill yet awaits a more classic transformation.
The geologists tell us that in early ages, like the Minisink of the Delaware, the region north of the Highlands adjacent to the Hudson Valley was a vast lake, extending back to Lake Champlain, which still remains as a fragment of the inland sea, following the melting of the great glacier. To get a southern outlet, the river broke through the mountain barrier and formed the winding and romantic Highland Pass. There is a grand outlook from the summit of the Storm King over this valley to the northward. The river expands into the beautiful Newburg Bay, its most perfect land-locked harbor, and its course can be traced through the "Long Reach" for more than twenty miles, a broad, straight stream between the pleasant banks, up to Crom Elbow, the "Krom Elleboge" of the original Dutch colonists. Villages dot the shores, and fertile fields stretch up on either hand, while hung in mid air, far away across the water, is the distant, slender, spider-like span of the high railway bridge at Poughkeepsie, the route by the "back door" into New England, which has gone through such serious throes of reconstruction. Upon the left hand the Catskills, and upon the right hand the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts, bound the distant horizon. Behind, and to the southward, the river can be traced as it winds through the Highlands down to Anthony's Nose, while nearer, one can look into the depression on top of the adjoining mountain, within a surrounding amphitheatre of peaks that makes the striking resemblance giving the significant name to the old Cro' Nest.
THE CULPRIT FAY.
Between the Storm King and old Cro' Nest is the deep and beautiful Vale of Tempe, with wild ravines furrowed through it, forming channels for clear mountain streams, and the trees conceal many a delicious dell. In this picturesque nook among the mountains is laid the scene of Joseph Rodman Drake's charming poem of "The Culprit Fay":