“Island of bliss amid the subject seas.”
It is as easy as it would be tautological to multiply suffrages in praise of insular regions. Still less necessary is it to bespeak popular favor for the island that gives this sketch a subject and a name.
The Dutch settlers of Staten Island seem to have regarded it with an enthusiasm quite in contrast with their usual phlegmatic temperament. Scarcely a century after its occupation by them, the patient and true-hearted Huguenots came to solace the woes of their exile amid its sheltering shades. The armies of Great Britain held it in possession during the whole of our revolutionary contest; and even the indurating influences of war did not render them insensible to its surpassing loveliness.
In later times, the States of New York and New Jersey have contended for its jurisdiction with the warmth of lovers, and the jealousy of rivals. The latter approaches with extended arms, as if to enfold it in an earnest embrace, its bright shores curving closely around the coveted treasure; but the Empire State, upon whose waters it reposes “as a star on the breast of the billow,” has bound the gem to her bosom forever.
Yet neither the taciturn Hollander, nor the mournful alien from France, nor the warring Saxon, nor the native-born American, yearned over it with such intense affection as the poor red man, its earliest lord. He longed to rear his cone-roofed cabin upon its sunny slopes, and to sweep with light canoe into its quiet coves, as his fathers had done of old. Forced by his pale-faced and powerful brother to yield this dearest birthright, he sold for as poor a compensation as the hunter-patriarch, then repented, retracted, reclaimed, re-sold, contended, and vanished like the smoke-wreath among the hills that he loved. Still, he cast the Parthian arrow, and the forests where he lingered and lay in ambush were crimsoned with blood.
Still, his parting sigh, wreathed itself into a name of blessing. “Monocnong,” or the Enchanted Woods, was the epithet he bestowed upon his beloved and forsaken heritage. In the bitterness of parting, he said that no noxious reptile had ever been found there, till the white man, like a wily serpent, coiled himself amid its shades.
MONOCNONG.
Gem of the Bay! enchased in waves of light,
That ’neath the sunbeam rear a diamond crest,
But to the wrathful spirit of the night