THE FOUR RIVERS.
THE HUDSON—THE MOHAWK—THE CHENANGO-SUSQUEHANNAII.
Some observer of nature offered a considerable a
word for two blades of striped grass exactly similar.
The infinite diversity, of which this is one instance,
exists in a thousand other features of nature, but in
none more strikingly than in the scenery of rivers.
What two in the world are alike! How often does
the attempt fail to compare the Hudson with the Rhine
—the two, perhaps, among celebrated rivers, which
are the nearest to a resemblance? Yet looking at the
first determination of a river's course, and the natural
operation of its search for the sea, one would suppose
that, in a thousand features, their valleys would scarce
be distinguishable.
I think, of all excitements in the world, that of the
first discovery and explanation of a noble river, must
be the most eager and enjoyable. Fancy “the bold
Englishman,” as the Dutch called Hendrich Hudson,
steering his little yacht, the Halve-Mane, for the first
time through the Highlands! Imagine his anxiety
for the channel forgotten as he gazed up at the towering
rocks, and round upon the green shores, and onward,
past point and opening bend, miles away into the
heart of the country; yet with no lessening of the
glorious stream beneath him, and no decrease of
promise in the bold and luxuriant shores! Picture
him lying at anchor below Newburgh, with the dark
pass of the “Wey-Gat” frowning behind him the
lofty and blue Catskills beyond, and the hill-sides
around covered with the red lords of the soil, exhibiting
only less wonder than friendliness. And how
beautifully was the assurance of welcome expressed,
when the “very kind old man” brought a bunch of
arrows, and broke them before the stranger, to induce
him to partake fearlessly of his hospitality!
The qualities of the Hudson are those most likely
to impress a stranger. It chances felicitously that the
traveller's first entrance beyond the sea-board is usually
made by the steamer to Albany. The grand and imposing
outlines of rock and horizon answer to his anticipations
of the magnificence of a new world; and if
he finds smaller rivers and softer scenery beyond, it
strikes him but as a slighter lineament of a more enlarged
design. To the great majority of tastes, this,
too, is the scenery to live among. The stronger lines
of natural beauty affect most tastes; and there are
few who would select country residence by beauty at
all, who would not sacrifice something to their preference
for the neighborhood of sublime scenery. The
quiet, the merely rural—a thread of a rivulet instead
of a broad river—a small and secluded valley, rather
than a wide extent of view, bounded by bold mountains,
is the choice of but few. The Hudson, therefore,
stands usually foremost in men's aspirations for
escape from the turmoil of cities; but to my taste,
though there are none more desirable to see, there
are sweeter rivers to live upon.
I made one of a party, very lately, bound upon a
rambling excursion up and down some of the river-courses
of New York. We had anticipated empty
boats, and an absence of all the gay company usually
found radiating from the city in June, and had made
up our minds for once to be contented with the study
of inanimate nature. Never were wiseheads more
mistaken. Our kind friend, Captain Dean, of the
Stevens, stood by his plank when we arrived, doing his
best to save the lives of the female portion of the
crowd rushing on board; and never, in the most palmy
days of the prosperity of our country, have we seen a
greater number of people on board a boat, nor a stronger
expression of that busy and thriving haste, which
is thought to be an exponent of national industry.
How those varlets of newsboys contrive to escape in
time, or escape at all, from being crushed or carried
off; how everybody's baggage gets on board, and
everybody's wife and child; how the hawsers are
slipped, and the boat got under way, in such a crowd
and such a crush, are matters understood. I suppose,
by Providence and the captain of the Stevens—but
they are beyond the comprehension of the passenger.
Having got out of hearing of “Here's the Star!”
“Buy the old major's paper, sir?” “Here's the Express!”
“Buy the New-Ery?” “Would you like a
New-Era, sir?” “Take a Sun, miss?” and a hundred
such deafening cries, to which New York has of
late years become subject, we drew breath and comparative
silence off the green shore of Hoboken, thanking
Heaven for even the repose of a steamboat, after
the babel of a metropolis. Stillness, like all other
things, is relative.
The passage of the Hudson is doomed to be be-written,
and we will not again swell its great multitude of
describers. Bound onward, we but gave a glance, in
passing, to romantic Undercliff and Cro'-Nest, hallowed
by the sweetest poetry our country has yet committed
to immortality; gave our malison to the black
smoke of iron-works defacing the green mantle of
nature, and our benison to every dweller on the shore
who has painted his fence white, and smoothed his
lawn to the river; and sooner than we used to do by
some five or six hours (ere railroads had supplanted
the ploughing and crawling coaches to Schenectady),
we fed our eyes on the slumbering and broad valley
of the Mohawk.
How startled must be the Naiad of this lovely river
to find her willowy form embraced between railroad
and canal! one intruder on either side of the bed so
sacredly overshaded! Pity but there were a new
knight of La Mancha to avenge the hamadryads and
water-nymphs of their wrongs from wood-cutters and
contractors! Where sleep Pan and vengeful Oread,
when a Yankee settler hews me down twenty wood-nymphs
of a morning! There lie their bodies, limbless
trunks, on the banks of the Mohawk, yet no Dutchman
stands sprouting into leaves near by, nor woollen
jacket turning into bark, as in the retributive olden
time! We are abandoned of these gods of Arcady!
They like not the smoke of steam funnels!
Talking of smoke reminds me of ashes. Is there
no way of frequenting railroads without the loss of
one's eyes. Must one pay for velocity as dearly as
Cacus for his oxen? Really this new invention is a
blessing—to the oculists! Ten thousand small crystals
of carbon cutting right and left among the fine vessels
and delicate membranes of the eye, and all this amid
glorious scenery, where to go bandaged (as needs
must), is to slight the master-work of nature! Either
run your railroads away from the river courses, gentlemen
contractors, or find some other place than your
passengers' eyes to bestow your waste ashes! I have
heard of “lies in smiles,” but there's a lye in tears,
that touches the sensibilities more nearly!
There is a drowsy beauty in these German flats that
seems strangely profaned by a smoky monster whisking
along twenty miles in the hour. The gentle canal-boat
was more homogeneous to the scene. The hills
lay off from the river in easy and sleepy curves, and
the amber Mohawk creeps down over its shallow gravel
with a deliberateness altogether and abominably out
of tune with the iron rails. Perhaps it is the rails out
of tune with the river—but any way there is a discord.
I am content to see the Mohawk, canal, and railroad
inclusive, but once a year.
We reached the head waters of the Chenango river,
by what Miss Martineau celebrates as an “exclusive
extra,” in an afternoon's ride from Utica. The latter
thrifty and hospitable town was as redolent of red
bricks and sunshine as usual; and the streets, to my
regret, had grown no narrower. They who laid out
the future legislative capital of New York, must have
been lovers of winter's wind and summer's sun. They
forgot the troubles of the near-sighted—(it requires
spectacles to read the signs or see the shops from one
side to the other); they forgot the perils of old women
and children in the wide crossings; they forgot the
pleasures of shelter and shade, of neighborly vis-à-vis,
of comfortable-lookingness. I maintain that Utica is
not a comfortable-looking town. It affects me like the
clown in the pantomime, when he sits down without
bending his legs—by mere straddling. I would not
say anything so ungracious if it were not to suggest a
remedy—a shady mall up and down the middle! What
a beautiful town it would be—like an old-fashioned
shirt bosom, with a frill of elms! Your children
would walk safely within the rails, and your country-neighbors
would expose their “sa'ace,” and cool their
tired oxen in the shade. We felt ourselves compensated
for paying nearly double price for our “extra,”
by the remarkable alacrity with which the coach came
to the door after the bargain was concluded, and the
politeness with which the “gentleman who made out
the way-bill,” acceded to our stipulation. He bowed
us off, expressed his happiness to serve us, and away
we went.
The Chenango, one of the largest tributaries to the
Susquehannah, began to show itself, like a small brook,
some fifteen or twenty miles from Utica. Its course
lay directly south—and the new canal kept along its
bank, as deserted, but a thousand times less beautiful
in its loneliness than the river, whose rambling curves
it seemed made to straighten. We were not in the
best humor, for our double priced “extra” turned out
to be the regular sage; and while we were delivering
and waiting for mails, and taking in passengers, the
troop of idlers at tavern-doors amused themselves with
reading the imaginative production called our “extra
way-bill,” as it was transferred, with a sagacious wink,
from one driver's hat to the other. I thought of
Paddy's sedan-chair, with the bottom out. “If it
were not for the name of the thing,” said he, as he
trotted along with a box over his head.
I say we were not in the best of humors with our
prompt and polite friend at Utica, but even through
these bilious spectacles, the Chenango was beautiful.
Its valley is wide and wild, and the reaches of the
capricious stream through the farms and woods along
which it loiters, were among the prettiest effects of
water scenery I have ever met. There is a strange
loneliness about it; and the small towns which were
sprinkled along the hundred miles of its course, seem
rather the poineers into a western wilderness, than
settlements so near the great thoroughfare to the lakes.
It is a delicious valley to travel through, barring
“corduroy.” Tre-men-dous! exclaims the traveller,
as the coach drops into a pit between two logs, and
surges up again—Heaven only knows how. And, as
my fellow-passenger remarked, it is a wonder the road
does not echo—“tree-mend-us!”
Five miles before reaching the Susquehannah, the
road began to mend, the hills and valleys assumed the
smile of cultivation, and the scenery before us took a
bolder and broader outline. The Chenango came
down full and sunny to her junction, like the bride,
who is most lovely when just losing her virgin name,
and pouring the wealth of her whole existence into
the bosom of another; and, untroubled with his new
burden, the lordly Susquehannah kept on his majestic
way, a type of such vainly-dreaded, but easily-borne
responsibilities.
At Binghamton, we turned our course down the
Susquehannah. This delicious word, in the Indian
tongue, describes its peculiar and constant windings,
and I venture to say that on no river in the world are
the grand and beautiful in scenery so gloriously mixed.
The road to Owego follows the course of the valley
rather than of the river, but the silver curves are constantly
in view; and, from every slight elevation, the
majestic windings are seen—like the wanderings of a
vein, gleaming through green fringes of trees, and
circling the bright islands which occasionally divide
their waters. It is a swift river, and singularly living
and joyous in its expression.
At Owego there is a remarkable combination of bold
scenery and habitable plain. One of those small,
bright rivers, which are called “creeks” in this country,
comes in with its valley at right angles, to the vale
and stream of the Susquehannah, forming a star with
three rays, or a plain with three radiating valleys, or a
city (in the future, perhaps), with three magnificent
exits and entrances. The angle is a round mountain,
some four or five hundred feet in height, which kneels
fairly down at the meeting of the two streams, while
another round mountain, of an easy acclivity, lifts
gracefully from the opposite bank, as if rising from
the same act of homage to Nature. Below the town
and above it, the mountains, for the first time, give in
to the exact shape of the river's short and capricious
course; and the plain on which the town stands, is
enclosed between two amphitheatres of lofty hills,
shaped with the regularity and even edge of a coliseum,
and resembling the two halves of a leaf-lined vase,
struck apart by a twisted wand of silver.
Owego creek should have a prettier name—for its
small vale is the soul and essence of loveliness. A
meadow of a mile in breadth, fertile, soft, and sprinkled
with stately trees, furnishes a bed for its swift
windings; and from the edge of this new tempe, on
the southern side, rise three steppes, or natural terraces,
over the highest of which the forest rears its
head, and looks in upon the meeting of the rivers,
while down the sides, terrace by terrace, leap the small
streamlets from the mountain-springs, forming each
again its own smaller dimple in this loveliest face of
Nature.
There are more romantic, wilder places than this
in the world, but none on earth more habitably beautiful.
In these broad valleys, where the grain-fields,
and the meadows, and the sunny farms, are walled in
by glorious mountain sides, not obtrusively near, yet
by their noble and wondrous outlines, giving a perpetual
refreshment, and an hourly-changing feast to
the eye—in these valleys, a man's household gods
yearn for an altar. Here are mountains that, to look
on but once, “become a feeling”—a river at whose
grandeur to marvel—and a hundred streamlets to lace
about the heart. Here are fertile fields, nodding with
grain; “a thousand cattle” grazing on the hills—here
is assembled together, in one wondrous centre, a specimen
of every most loved lineament of Nature. Here
would I have a home! Give me a cottage by one of
these shining streamlets—upon one of these terraces,
that seem steps to Olympus, and let me ramble over
these mountain sides, while my flowers are growing,
and my head silvering in tranquil happiness. He
whose Penates would not root ineradicably here, has
no heart for a home, nor senses for the glory of Nature!
END OF LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL.
