Albany is the seat of government, and has a State House, of which the historian of New York remarks: “In the structure of this edifice, the rules of architecture, whether Egyptian, Hindoo, Chinese, Grecian, Roman, Saracenic, Gothic, or Composite, have been violated.” Lately, however, a taste for a better style of architecture seems to prevail; and in North Pearl-street we lately noticed a façade (we think, of a new church,) in a very pure and beautiful style. The private houses of Albany are built, many of them, very expensively; and the city is remarkable for its hospitality. [Illustration] CROW NEST, FROM BULL HILL, WEST POINT. * * * * * It is true of the Hudson, as of all other rivers, that, to be seen to advantage, it should form the middle, not the foreground of the picture. Those who go to Albany by steam have something the same idea of the scenery of West Point, that an inside passenger may have of the effect of the Brighton coach at top-speed. It is astonishing how much foreground goes for in landscape; and there are few passes of scenery where it is more naturally beautiful than those of the Hudson. In the accompanying drawing, the picturesque neighbourhood of Undercliff, the seat of Colonel Morris, lies between the river and the artist, and directly opposite stands the peak of Crow Nest, mentioned in the description of West Point. Crow Nest is one of the most beautiful mountains of America for shape, verdure, and position; and when the water is unruffled, and the moon sits on his summit, he looks like a monarch crowned with a single pearl. This is the scene of the first piece-work of fancy which has come from the practical brain of America,—the poem of The Culprit Fay. The opening is so descriptive of the spot, that it is quite in place here; and to those who have not seen the poem (as most European readers have not) it will convey an idea of a production which, in my opinion, treads close on the heels of the Midsummer Night’s Dream:— “’Tis the middle watch of a summer’s night,— The earth is dark, but the heavens are bright; Nought is seen in the vault on high, But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky, And the flood which rolls its milky hue,— A river of light on the welkin blue. The moon looks down on old Crow Nest, She mellows the shades on his shaggy breast And seems his huge grey form to throw In a silver cone on the wave below; His sides are broken by spots of shade, By the walnut boughs and the cedar made, And through their clustering branches dark Glimmers and dies the firefly’s spark,— Like starry twinkles that momently break Through the rifts of the gathering tempest rack.