The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 19, May, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 19, May, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
If I were a crow, or, at least, had the faculty of flying with that
swift directness which is proverbially attributed to the corvine tribe,
and were to wing a southwesterly course from the truck of the flag-staff
which rises from the Battery at New York, I should find myself, within a
very short time, about fifty miles from the turbulent city, and hovering
over a region of country as little like the civilized emporium just
quitted as it is well possible to conceive. Not being a crow, however,
nor fitted up with an apparatus for flying,--destitute even of a
balloon,--I am compelled to adopt the means of locomotion which the
bounty of God or the ingenuity of man affords me, and to spend a
somewhat longer time in transit to my destination.
Over the New Jersey Railroad, then, I rattled, one fine, sunshiny autumn
morning, in the year that has recently taken leave of us, as far as
Bordentown, a distance of some fifty-seven miles, on my way to a
locality the very existence of which is scarcely dreamed of by thousands
in the metropolis, who can tell you how many square miles of malaria
there are in the Roman Campagna, and who have got the topography of
Caffre Land at their fingers' ends. It is a region aboriginal in
savagery, grand in the aspects of untrammelled Nature; where forests
extend in uninterrupted lines over scores of miles; where we may wander
a good day's journey without meeting half-a-dozen human faces; where
stately deer will bound across our path, and bears dispute our passage
through the cedar-brakes; where, in a word, we may enjoy the undiluted
essence, the perfect wildness, of woodland life. Deep and far "under the
shade of melancholy boughs" we shall be taken, if together we visit the
ancient Pines of New Jersey.
In order to do so, we must make at Bordentown the acquaintance of Mr.
Cox, and take our seats in his stage for a jolt, twelve miles long, to
the village of New Egypt, on the frontier of the Pines. Although the
forest is accessible from many points, and may be entered by a number of
distinct approaches, I, the writer hereof, selected that _viâ_ New Egypt
as the most convenient to a comer from New York, and as, perhaps, the
least fatiguing to accomplish.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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