To the dwellers on the plain below, the effect on the aforesaid fourth of July was indescribably fine; the guns thundering and echoing in a region so far above us, their gleams of fire flashing out amid the clouds of white smoke that rolled their eddying volumes round the old dismantled ramparts. The salute was followed by a full burst of martial harmony from the band, who had also gone up into the ruins; all playing so admirably and in such perfect unison, that the whole of their various instruments sounded like one alone—but like one whose grand and exquisite tones seemed scarcely to belong to earth. The band had their fourth of July dinner within the dilapidated recesses of the moss-grown fortress, and frequently during the day, we heard their music. Sometimes the soft sweet warblings of the octave flute rose alone upon the air; then the clear melodious tones of Willis’s bugle seemed to “lap the soul in Elysium;” then came the clarionets deepened by the trombone; and finally the loud and thrilling notes of the bass-drum struck grandly in, and swelled the full tide of sound till the rocks seemed to tremble with its reverberations. Music, like painting, has its lights and shadows. Nothing can be more lovely than the scenery about West Point when lighted up by the beams of the summer moon. While there, I was once on a water party, in a delightful evening towards the close of the “leafy month of June.” The gentlemen attached to the military academy had made arrangements for taking the ladies on a moonlight voyage through the highlands, in the boats belonging to the post. Of these boats I think there were eight. The first and largest was appropriated to the band—in the others followed the professors connected with the institution, the officers, and the ladies—with soldiers as oarsmen. We were rowed to the upper extremity of the highlands, beyond Butter Hill which, notwithstanding its homely name, is a magnificent mountain with a gradual slope on the land-side, but presenting to the water a perpendicular precipice in height sixteen hundred feet. In the clefts of this lofty rock tradition has asserted that the pirate Blackbeard deposited portions of his treasure more than a century ago. It is not many years since a gentleman who believed the story, was killed by losing his hold, and falling down backwards upon the stones below, in a desperate attempt to scale the precipice in quest of the rover’s gold. As we embarked on our aquatic excursion “the moon arose curtained in clouds which her beams gradually dispelled.” When she climbed above them, as they “turned forth their silver linings to the night,” and her rays touched the top of the eastern hills, while their dark sides reposed in shadow, I thought of a song in the Carnival of Venice. “And while the moon shines on the stream, And while soft music breathes around, The feathering oar returns the gleam And dips in concert to the sound.”