New-York has within it the sublime mountain scenery of the Kaätskills, where the eagle wheels over their hoary summits, and the winds receive an edge which sometimes kills the flowers of May in the valley. It has primeval forests where the axe has not sounded, and a few red men yet linger amid their gloom; and it has plains which stretch themselves for miles, like the prairies of the far West. It has solitudes where the foot of man has scarcely trod; and yet for three hundred miles, from the Hudson to the great lakes, it has city after city, town after town, village after village, in one unbroken chain, rising like magic on the borders of lakes or in the heart of vallies, where a few years since reigned the silence of nature; a proud attestation of the superiority of the Saxon race. Situated in a most favored zone, with skies hanging over it for the greatest portion of the year unclouded as those of Italy, it enjoys the four seasons, with their accompanying blessings, in equal distribution; the spring with its gradual advances; the luxury of summer; the autumn with its prodigal abundance; and that which enhances all these, and is likewise full of sublimity, the snows of winter. Whoever has sailed upon its rivers, or clambered its mountain-sides, or descended into its vallies, or gazed upon its cataracts, but most of all, has become acquainted with its works of art, must acknowledge that this is preëminently the Empire State.
But the Bay of New-York, rivalling the noblest in the world for its depth, expansiveness, and beauty of its rising shores, is another feature which deserves to be mentioned; and then we come to a city, destined also to stand in the first class. Accustomed as I had been to entertain an unpardonable prejudice and ignorance concerning the New World, and almost to confound the name of American with the red aborigines, it was with unfeigned surprise that I found myself in such a city, stunned with the hum of her incessant bustle and commerce, in the midst of somewhat fresh but stately buildings, and mingling with the crowds in a thoroughfare, considering its extent, one of the most magnificent in the world. Enthusiasm banished every prejudice. I beheld on all sides the aspect of a luxurious metropolis; well-furnished shops, churches, public buildings, and private dwellings, which would have graced any city of Christendom. Fountains in various parts were throwing up their waters to a great height, and with profuse liberality. A river flowed through the streets, brought from a distance of forty-five miles by an aqueduct, in design and execution one of the most bold, stupendous works of any age or country; yet some of my countrymen, who profess to write books, have not even alluded to it.
Surrounded by so many wonders, I looked for something to remind me of the past; to convince me that all this was not the work of magic, or of a few years. I could not persuade myself that the Indian ever rambled through the forests which covered the site of this city, and that the canoe shot silently over the waters where I beheld such a forest of masts. Just then, attracted by the sound of music, and the eager looks of a crowd, I observed twelve Indians, (among them were some handsome women) standing on a balcony which fronted the main street of the city, wrapped in blankets, with painted faces, and ornamented with a variety of gew-gaws. They were Sioux, who had come on under the care of an agent, and were exhibited as a show. The crowd gazed for a few moments, and passed on with indifference: but it was a spectacle calculated to plunge one into the most serious reverie. Here were the descendants of the original possessors of the soil; the same class of men whom Columbus described when he kissed the soil of which he took possession; children of the same frailties, ornamented in the same manner, the worshippers of the same spirit! Here was the bustling Present; they were the representatives of the Past; the poor children whose fathers once possessed this whole continent, now gazed at, as if they were cannibals from the South Seas! As they stood erect on the balcony, unconscious of the ardent gaze of the crowd, dignified, silent, and unmoved, they seemed to me like antique pictures hung upon a wall, in a garb and costume long since obsolete. They carried with them their arrows and their tomahawks, but these had long ago become powerless against the arts of civilized man. They looked down upon the Saxons, and saw the race which had destroyed their's. Around them the marble and the granite were piled in stately buildings; the columns of Christian temples rose before them, and the interminable streets of a great city. I gazed again at the poor children of the forest, then at the accumulating crowd, and all the evidence of power which I saw around; and the juxtaposition appeared to illustrate most forcibly the forces and resource of two races of men. The twelve Sioux on the balcony, with their blankets, hatchets, and store of arrow-heads, were to the physical strength and arts of the surrounding people what the whole race of the red men is now to the race of the whites.
The greatness of the city of New-York, which is the metropolis of the whole country, belies its provincial name, and its prosperity attests its unrivalled position near the sea. According to the present ratio of its increase, in less than twenty years it will number over half a million of inhabitants, and in less than a century will attain the rank which London now holds. The Old World pours in its wealth perpetually, and it is the great centre and mart of commerce for the New. Thither all the streams of commerce converge and meet. The cold regions of the North, the cotton-growing South, the great valley of the Mississippi, and beyond the Rocky mountains to Astoria, the wild regions of the utmost West contribute to its wealth. But passing by the feature of a great city, what a river has New-York! I refer not to any of those which lie upon her borders, and are shared by other states or nations, but to the Hudson, which is all her own. 'I thank God,' wrote the elegant Irving, soon after his return to his native State, from a long residence abroad, 'I thank God that I was born on the banks of the Hudson! I fancy I can trace much of what is good and pleasant in my own heterogeneous compound, to my early companionship with this glorious river. In the warmth of my youthful enthusiasm, I used to clothe it with moral attributes, and almost to give it a soul. I admired its frank, bold, honest character; its noble sincerity and perfect truth. Here was no specious, smiling surface, covering the dangerous sand-bar or perfidious rock; but a stream deep as it was broad, and bearing with honorable faith the bark that trusted to its waves. I gloried in its simple, quiet, majestic, epic flow; ever straight-forward. Once indeed, it turns aside for a moment, forced from its course by opposing mountains, but it struggles bravely through them, and immediately resumes its straight-forward march. 'Behold,' thought I, 'an emblem of a good man's course through life; ever simple, open, and direct; or if, overpowered by adverse circumstances, he deviate into error, it is but momentary; he soon recovers his onward and honorable career, and continues it to the end of his pilgrimage.' The Hudson is, in a manner, my first and last love; and after all my wanderings, and seeming infidelities, I return to it with a heart-felt preference over all the other rivers in the world. I seem to catch new life, as I bathe in its ample billows, and inhale the pure breezes of its hills. It is true, the romance of youth is past, that once spread illusions over every scene. I can no longer picture an Arcadia in every green valley; nor a fairy land among the distant mountains; nor a peerless beauty in every villa gleaming among the trees; but though the illusions of youth have faded from the landscape, the recollections of departed years and departed pleasures shed over it the mellow charm of evening sunshine.'[B]
We can add little to a picture like this, save the reiteration, that the Hudson is one of the noblest rivers in volume, and that its scenery is the grandest, of any river in the world. The Rhine, through a part of its course, is dreary and uninteresting. The Mississippi is incredible in its length: it rises amid the wintry snows, and passes into the insupportable heats of summer, bearing to another great city of the American union, fifteen hundred miles from New-York, the immense wealth of its valley. It is the Father of Waters. But its stream is always turbid; its shores flat and gloomy; its aspect melancholy, yet suggestive of deep thought. But the Hudson rolls brilliantly from where its thin streams rise in the mountains, until it swells into a magnificent river, and bursts into that noble bay. Here are no castles upon the beetling crags, associated with olden story; or hoary ruins, every stone of which could tell a tale. Here are no ivied turrets, or moss-grown walls, or battlements crowning the rock; yet it lacks not, though it needs not, the charms of history and associations of the past: it needs not the embellishments of romance or pen of the poet; it is grand enough to fill the mind with contemplations of itself. Follow its course in one of those princely boats, miracles of architecture! three hundred feet in length, which rush daily over its surface, swift as the lightning, yet more gracefully than swans—the 'Knickerbocker'! Now it is wide enough for whole navies to ride at anchor; and the distant shores look dim, which afterward approach each other, and present the aspect of gay meadows and cultivated fields. Now it rushes around mountainous promontories, or cuts its passage through immense piles of perpendicular rocks, which stand yawning on either side as if a giant had torn them asunder to let the river pass through. Ossa is piled upon Pelion, Pelion upon Ossa; and from the grandeur or beauty of the neighboring scene, the eye is directed by turns upon the waving outline of distant mountains. They are like the ocean-color, 'darkly, deeply, beautifully blue.' Sometimes the river becomes an expansive bay; then a lovely lake shut in with hills; then a fair and even-flowing stream. Memory can scarcely do justice to that splendid variety of highland and lowland, precipice and verdant field, towns and villages; and the swift boat makes all this one moving panorama.
Nor does the river abate in interest if you follow it two hundred and fifty miles, where its origin is found in the little brooks and delicious streamlets where the trout harbors, or among the thickets where the frightened deer hastens to plunge into the lake. There is a region in the northern part of the State, wild and uninhabited, containing two hundred little lakes. There are to be found scenes of indescribable beauty, to which only the pencil of the painter could do justice; and yet there are few to tell him where to transport his easel. Its pathless wilderness precludes also the huntsman; and deer and an abundance of wild game are secure in the fastnesses which have never been invaded by man. Yet is all this little, compared with the dominions of the Empire State. The traveller who directs his course westward from the Hudson to the great lakes, will pause at every step to wonder at her variety of productions, her endless resources, the magical growth of towns which have some scores of thousands of inhabitants, and yet twenty years ago contained only a few log-cabins of the hunters! The whole space is a series of long, swelling undulations; uplands which slope away for miles insensibly into rich-bottomed vallies, each one possessing its broad, deep lake; and every one of these lakes is a perfect gem. Otsego, Oneida, Skeneateles, Owasco, Cayuga, Seneca, and a score of others are passed in succession; and on the shores of each the lover of the picturesque might spend weeks with profit and delight. With such a prodigality of waters, and especially in the vicinity of the great lakes, the thunder-storms engendered by the summer heats are of terrific grandeur. One would think that the dissolution of nature was at hand. Some one has justly remarked that all things here are on a large scale.
But the memories of the traveller are destined to be effaced, when he hears for the first time the thunders of the Great Cataract, and his eyes are turned to behold the cloud of spray which rises like perpetual incense above its brink. From the sea-shore to Niagara is now scarcely two days of easy travel. Not many years since, to go thither, one was compelled to plod his way through a tangled wilderness, trusting to uncertain pathways, in momentary fear of wild beasts or wilder savages; and when he arrived at the place, nothing but the rapture of the vision could enable him to forget the perils of the journey, and the prospect of the return. One was forced to pass by other sublimities of nature, which are now unseen because they have disappeared; the gloom of forests and gigantic trees, and the tumult of other cascades and waterfalls which are avoided by a more direct route. The transition is most remarkable from the heart of a great city, hundreds of miles distant, to the brink of this stupendous precipice. The forests which used to intervene, are reduced to separate clumps or groups of trees, which whirl round on the verge of the horizon, and disappear, making the head giddy; and one occasionally beholds the trunk or mummy of a gigantic oak prostrate on the ground, preserving its ancient form and semblance, but ashes to the core. This is where the pioneer has been; and these are but the shadows of difficulties which once impeded the traveller at every step.
Oh! the Rapids! the Rapids! It would atone for months of peril, to know the exultation which arises from looking on that congregation of billows! There they come, from the whole chain of lakes and great inland seas, an incalculable host, plunging down a long sloping hill-side, which is the bed of the wide Niagara river near the chasm; storming the foundations of fast-anchored islands, and shattered by the obstructions which they hurry with them, the fragments of the convulsion which burst open the abyss where they leap! They seemed to me infinitely more grand than the sea when it rolls its huge breakers to the shore after a storm. Look onward, and the prospect is alike infinite. The sky and the white crests of waves form the boundary of vision, and seem as if they poured out of the sky, so great is the descent; the waters gorging the wide stream, and impeded at every step by rocks, and concealed caverns, whirl, writhe, and agonize, with a violence of agitation of which it is in vain to endeavor to convey an idea. It is the highest example of wrath and strength in the elements, exerted without any cessation or rest. The sea is upheaved mightily, but it is sometimes calm, and reflects the clear sky. The volcano intermits its fiery grandeur. The conflagration dies in ashes, where its little spark was first kindled. The freshet, which is irresistible in its might, subsides in violence, and permits the flowers to grow up again on the fertile banks, and be imaged in the tranquil stream. The wildest hurricane which bears upward the oak, abates into the musical winds. But here the fury is unceasing; there is only an awful, unnatural calm upon the brink of the precipice. And it is difficult to believe that there is any thing yet behind the curtain, and that all this display of waters, grand as it is, cannot convey the faintest idea of that which remains, and is but the ushering in of a more glorious spectacle.
Think of the gentle river in the valley, with just current enough to preserve its purity, and so visited by the winds that it would not ruffle the swan's breast which reposes upon it so gracefully! Then turn hither for contrast, and look in vain on this mad flood for a single image of peace! Standing on the bridge which spans the American cataract, and stretches to the islet which conducts you to Goat Island, you look down and shudder. Nothing which breathes could be tortured in that flood a moment, and live. Come then and look into the abyss, and see the waters take the last plunge! And here description ceases, for the simple reason that it would be all in vain. With a grand sweeping arch, they roll forward over the ledge, are calm and silent upon the brink, then dashed into atoms on the rocks far below. The white smoke gushes up as from a hot furnace to the sky! Oh what a cataract, and rocks, and river, whirlpools, and awful chasms, solitude and yet communion with spirits, silence and yet 'mighty thunderings!' I thought I had died, and was breathing an immortal life in a new planet, where every surrounding object was more vast and incomprehensible. I listened to a voice which combines all sounds, yet chords with none in nature which it resembles; not with the bass of ocean, not with the winter winds. It is something which connects you palpably with the Past; a carrying of the thoughts and imaginations far backward: like listening to the blast of a trumpet prolonged by an angel from the beginning of time. A storm burst tumultuously above the cataract. The long reverberations of thunder would have terrified in another place; but here they added nothing to the sublime. At last the sunshine, after a little interval, broke out of the clouds, and rain-bows crowned the glory of the scene, whose rich tints were perpetuated when the moon arose. For here on the very spot, in the midst of the violent element, where one might almost doubt the word of Deity that he would not again overwhelm the earth with water, among the manifestations of His presence, sublimer than any but those on Sinai, he has dissipated every doubt, and hung over the whole magnificent scene his perpetual bow of promise.