I recommend to all visiters at the West Point hotel not to neglect ascending to the belvidere or skylight room on the top of that building. The view from thence is so vast and so magnificent that it rarely fails to call forth exclamations of delighted astonishment; particularly when autumn has colored the woods with its glowing and varied tints of scarlet, crimson, and purple, and with every shade of brown and yellow from the richest to the palest—such tints as, at this season, are to be found only in the foliage of America, and are most beautiful when seen through the gauzy haze of the Indian summer—that farewell smile of the departing year. Then the dilated disk of the sun looks round and red through its thin misty veil; the calm and slumbering river reflects a sky of the mildest blue; and near the shores its waters glow with the inverted beauties of the many-colored woods and hills. If viewed at evening, the splendor of the picture is increased by the glories of an autumnal sunset, when the clouds (such as are only seen in mountainous regions) assume the grandest forms and the most gorgeous hues.
Often after the last lingering beam has faded in the west, and all the stars have come out in the deep blue heaven, a dark mist appears behind the hills in the north, and from its dun recesses arise the ever-changing corruscations of the mysterious aurora borealis. Sometimes, its broad rays extend upwards nearly to the zenith, and diffuse a cold strange light upon the river and its western banks, rendering perfectly distinct the sloops on the water, and the trees and rocks on the shore. In the houses on the bank, the front-rooms are at times so well lighted by this incomprehensible phenomenon, that a newspaper may be read after the lamps or candles have been removed from the apartment. Then, perhaps in a few minutes, “the north’s dancing streamers relinquished their fire,” and faded dimly away into darkness. Suddenly they would again revive, darting upwards in renewed brightness their far-spreading rays, tinted with crimson and purple, and sometimes even with green and blue.
In a chamber that I once occupied at West Point there was a small knot-hole in the upper part of one of the shutters, by means of which, in cold weather, when the windows were closed fast, and the room consequently darkened, I frequently at early morning saw as in a camera obscura, a landscape depicted on the white wall above the mantel-piece. So that before I was up myself, I could observe the first gleams of the dawnlight, and the changing colors of the clouds as they brightened upon the blue sky, lending their glories to the hills beyond the river: and the first rays of the sun, when they “fired the proud tops of the eastern pines.” In this way, without opening the shutters to look out, I could always tell whether the morning was clear or cloudy.
The winter at West Point is long and cold; and (before the days of rail roads,) when the river was once closed, the ice fast, and the boats laid up for the season, the inhabitants of this insulated spot seemed nearly shut out from all communication with the rest of the world; and it may easily be guessed what interest was attached to the mails, after the difficulties of transportation caused them to arrive irregularly. We were very soon convinced of the fact that
“When cold and raw the wind doth blow
Bleak in the morning early,
When all the hills are cover’d with snow
Then it is winter fairly.”
I have known the snow so deep and so drifted, as to block up the parlor windows of the house we then inhabited, precluding all possibility of opening the shutters; and as to clear it away was no trifling task, we were more than once obliged to breakfast by candle-light at eight o’clock.
In the “blue serene” of the clear and intensely cold mornings, which usually succeeded a deep fall of snow, I have seen the whole atmosphere glittering with minute particles of ice: to breathe which must, in delicate lungs, have caused a sensation similar to laceration with a sharp knife. No one afflicted with pulmonary disease should live at West Point.