IV. SAIL DOWN THE LAKE TO BLUFF POINT
The first stop was at Port Henry, one of the five gateways to the Adirondacks and one of the large iron-ore ports of the country. This picturesque village, nestling under the foothills of the Adirondacks, the home of Commissioner Walter C. Witherbee and Hon. Frank S. Witherbee, overlooks the lake, the Champlain Memorial Lighthouse and historical Chimney Point on the Vermont shore. In this town is located the principal office of Witherbee, Sherman & Company, extensive iron producers and donors to the State of New York of the lands on which are situated the Crown Point Forts. It has a public library and other public buildings, churches, etc. The steamer then proceeded northward past Westport and Essex, attractive summer resorts on the west shore of the lake and also past Thompson’s Point, Cedar Beach and other resorts on the east shore of the lake to Burlington, which rises above the blue waters of the lake in some such manner as does Naples above the blue Mediterranean. It has its beautiful semicircular bay with its two arms, projecting far out into the lake, similar to the beautiful bay of Naples with its Sorrento and Posilipo, projecting far out into the sea. It has its University, as has Naples, which has been a center of learning and culture for many years. It rises less precipitously and with more uniform gradation from the margin of the lake to the college campus, where the University buildings crown the summit as does the castle of St. Elmo the city of Naples. Its streets and avenues are broader and better shaded than are those of Naples, but it has many points of resemblance, which are suggestive of that rare Neapolitan fascination not found elsewhere. Instead of the active and ever-threatening Vesuvius, there rises in the background superbly beautiful Mt. Mansfield silhouetted against the deep blue eastern sky. The commanding view from the elevation of the University of Vermont to the eastward and especially to the westward across the lake toward the rugged Adirondacks, rising precipitously from the water’s edge to the sky line, is such as to enable one to survey the width as well as something of the length of the valley and appreciate its pictorial grandeur. As the sun gilds the sky-pointing peaks and fills the valleys with rosy light, except where drifting clouds cast their shadows athwart the mountain ranges and as the placid waters of the lake reflect the overarching azure sky, in an atmosphere—the clarity of which like that on the summit of Salvatore accentuates nature’s beauties,—one is reminded that the Champlain valley presents many views worthy the brush of a Turner, a Corot or a Cormon. In the poem on “Lake Champlain” by S. S. Cutting, D. D., will be found the following:
Oh matchless splendors! never sung nor told,
Now golden purple, now empurpled gold!
O’er mount and plain the heavens their tints diffuse
And tinge the waves with iridescent hues.
And now, when slowly fades departing day,
The moon, full-orbed, walks her celestial way,
And bathing all things in her silver light,
Prolongs the beauty through the slumbering night.