[page 168]
It may seem antiquated and old-fashioned in the midst of elevated railroads to speak of mountain driveways, but that to Palenville, as we last saw it, was a beautiful piece of engineering—as smooth as a floor and securely built. It looks as if it were intended to last for a century, the stone work is so thoroughly finished. The views from this road are superior to anything we have seen in the Catskills, and the great sweep of the mountain clove recalls a Sierra Nevada trip on the way to the Yosemite.
The writer will never forget another Catskill drive fully twenty years ago. Starting one morning with a pair of mustang ponies from Phœnicia, we called at the Kaaterskill, the Catskill Mountain House, and the Laurel House, took supper at Catskill Village, and reached New York that evening at eleven o'clock. It is unnecessary to say that we were on business—our book was on the press—and we went as if one of the printers' best-known companions was on our trail.
Irving's description of his first voyage up the river brings us more delicately and gracefully down from these mountains to the Hudson—the level highway to the sea. "Of all the scenery of the Hudson, the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination. Never shall I forget the effect upon me of my first view of them, predominating over a wide extent of country—part wild, woody and rugged; part softened away into all the graces of cultivation. As we slowly floated along, I lay on the deck and watched them through a long summer's day, undergoing a thousand mutations under the magical effects of atmosphere; sometimes seeming to approach; at other times to recede; now almost melting into hazy distance, now burnished by the setting sun, until in the evening they printed themselves against the glowing sky in the deep purple of an Italian landscape."
Limned upon the fair horizon,
West from central Hudson's tide,
The fair form of Ontiora
Throughout ages shall abide.
Jared Barhete.