The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. I., No. 6, February, 1835Various
History
The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. I., No. 6, February, 1835
Various
American literature -- 19th century -- Periodicals
The voyage hither from Albany abounds with captivating spectacles. For
the first fifty miles, these consisted chiefly of waving hills,
interspersed with modest but handsome country seats half-veiled by
trees;--and of villages and landings, where, at intervals of four or
five miles, our immense floating Hotel would halt to take in and land
passengers--if halt it could be called, when her motion was not
actually suspended, but only slackened, while by _her boat_, she
rapidly communicated with the shore. The Catskill Mountains were in
sight; and we were nearly entering the Highlands, so celebrated in the
journal of every tourist, from Dolph Heyliger downwards, for their
almost matchless combination of beauty and sublimity; when the _lean_
"orderer of all things," for reasons best known to himself and his
employers, contrived to coop us all under hatches at dinner. A slender
appetite, and a surmise that there would be something worth seeing,
carried me on deck before the rest were half done eating; when
mountains, hemming in the majestic Hudson to a width of not more than
five or six hundred yards, broke at once upon my view. They rise, from
the water's very edge, within twenty or thirty degrees of the
perpendicular, to a height of fourteen or fifteen hundred feet; their
sides and summits undulating with various prominences and depressions,
occupied by dark brown rocks, intermingled with scanty shadings of
evergreens, stunted bushes, and shrubs. After sailing three or four
miles between these awful embankments, we reach West Point. Here are
quite too many pleasing objects, for enumeration; a skilful book-wright
could make a volume of them. 'Kosciusko's Garden' is a romantic
_sinus_, or recess, in the precipice which forms the eastern face,
(upon the river) of the _table land_ called West Point. Hither, it is
said, that hero used daily to retire for meditation and repose; and a
shelf in the rock is shewn, as the couch where he often reclined. Nay,
within a few inches of where his head probably used to lie, an
indentation in the rock is pointed out, said to have been made by a
cannon ball, fired at him from a British man of war that lay in the
river: but this story "wants confirmation." You descend by a flight of
stone steps to the "Garden," which is only ten or fifteen feet above
the river. It is furnished with wooden seats; and with a neat fountain
of whitish marble, in which bubbles up a bold vein of water.
On the north-eastern angle of the "Point," around which the river
somewhat abruptly sweeps, is a handsome monument, erected by the Cadets
some years ago, to the same hero. It is a plain marble column, about
fifteen or eighteen feet high; with no inscription save the single word
"KOSCIUSKO." This simple memorial is, in moral sublimity, scarcely
inferior to that conception, one of the noblest of its kind in the
whole compass of poetry--
"We carved not a line, we raised not a stone,
But we _left him alone with his glory_."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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