From Catskill the busy and all-glorious Hudson is seen winding half its silver length,—towns, villas, and white spires sparkling on the shores, and snowy sails and gaily-painted steamers specking its bosom. It is a constant diorama of the most lively beauty; and the traveller as he looks down upon it sighs to make it a home. Yet a smaller and less-frequented stream would best fulfil desires born of a sigh. There is either no seclusion on the Hudson, or there is so much that the conveniences of life are difficult to obtain. Where the steamers come to shore,—twenty a day, with each from one to seven hundred passengers,—it is certainly far from secluded enough; yet away from the landing-places servants find your house too lonely, and your table, without unreasonable expense and trouble, is precarious and poor. These mean and menus plaisirs reach, after all, the very citadel of philosophy. Who can live without a cook or a chamber-maid, and dine seven days in the week on veal, consoling himself with the beauties of a river-side?
On the smaller rivers these evils are somewhat ameliorated; for in the rural and uncorrupt villages of the interior you may find servants born on the spot, and content to live in the neighborhood. The market is better, too, and the society less exposed to the evils that result from too easy an access to the metropolis. No place can be rural, in all the virtues of the phrase, where a steamer will take the villager to the city between noon and night, and bring him back between midnight and morning. There is a suburban look and character about all the villages on the Hudson which seem out of place among such scenery. They are suburbs; in fact, steam has destroyed the distance between them and the city.
THE CATTERSKILL FALLS.
’Midst greens and shades the Catterskill leaps
From cliffs where the wood-flower clings;
All summer he moistens his verdant steeps
With the sweet light spray of the mountain springs;
And he shakes the woods on the mountain side,
When they drip with the rains of autumn-tide.