Nathaniel Parker Willis

“ A small ear-shaped lake, sunk as deep into the earth as the firs shoot above it, and clear and unbroken as a mirror, save the pearl-spots of the thousand lotuses holding up their cups to the blue eye of heaven, sleeps beneath his window; and around him in the forest, lies, still unbroken, the elastic and brown carpet of the faded pine-tassels, deposited in yearly layers since the continent first rose from the flood, and rotted a foot beneath the surface to a rich mould that would fatten the Symplegades to a flower-garden. ”

“ CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON.
The Capitol presents a very noble appearance, as the spectator advances to it in the point of view taken by the artist; and from what is shown of the proportions and size of the building, a very imposing effect is produced. Its height, the ascending terraces, the monument and its fountain, the grand balustrade of freestone which protects the offices below, and the distinct object which it forms, standing alone on its lofty site, combine to make up the impression of grandeur, in which its architectural defects are lost or forgotten. ”

“ The uniformity and plainness which William Penn has bequeathed in such an abiding legacy to Philadelphia, however, is seen but by a faint penumbra in the dress of the inhabitants, or in their equipages, style of living, and costliness of furniture and entertainment. A faint shadow of original simplicity there still certainly exists, visible through all the departures from the spirit of Quakerism; and it is a leaven of taste and elegance in the ferment of luxury which has given Philadelphia emphatically a character for refinement. ”

“ Doughty is in sketches of this description, his forte lies in scenery of a softer and inland character—in the lonely forest-brook, the misty wood-lake, the still river, the heart of the quiet wilderness. In painting these features of Nature, he has (in his peculiar style) no rivals among American painters—perhaps none in England. His landscapes can scarcely be appreciated by those who have not seen the untouched and graceful wilderness of America; but of travellers who have, they touch the heart and fill the memory afresh. He is a most sweet and accomplished artist ”

“ The Great Spirit has not made us to live together. There is poison in the white man’s cup; the white man’s dog barks at the red man’s heels. If I should leave the land of my fathers, whither shall I fly? Shall I go to the south, and dwell among the groves of the Pequots? Shall I wander to the west? the fierce Mohawk—the man-eater—is my foe. ”

“ The green Venetian blind is universal; the broad, open hall extends through the house, showing the gay alley of a garden in the rear; and, living in the midst of a primitive and friendly community, the inhabitants sit at their low windows along the street, or promenade, without fear of rude observation, on the shady pavement before their dwellings, preserving for the place altogether that look of out-of-doors life and gaiety which, with less elegance, distinguishes Naples and other cities of southern Europe. ”

“ Emerging to the sunshine beyond, the river spreads out in its thousand windings, as if rejoicing in the space of which it is so soon to be deprived, and in a moment or two (if you are travelling by steam) your course is arrested amid the foaming and busy scenery of the Falls, the picturesque and the hideous, the wildly beautiful and the merely useful, so huddled together that the artist who would draw either the architecture or the scenery by itself, would scarce find a bit large enough for a vignette. ”

“ It requires the prospective glance of an American to see the form of nature, which is now in dishabille, restored to her neat drapery, glowing with vegetation, and decked with flowers. The outline of her fair proportions is enough for him; and so that is beautiful, as in this country it almost every where is, he can finish the portrait to his fancy, and make a flowery Tempe of a prostrate wilderness. ”

“ During the old-fashioned winters, when about New-year’s day every one expected to see or hear of an ox-roast on the river, upon the thick-ribbed ice, which, without causing much alarm among the thousands moving in all directions upon its surface, would crack and rend itself by its own weight without separating, in sounds like thunder, among the then multitudinous throngs of promenaders, sliders, and skaiters, visible all about the river, as far as the eye could reach. ”

“ Compare the old Indian canoe in which Hudson went from his vessel to the land, with a steamer carrying on its deck near a thousand souls; compare the untutored population which then swarmed upon the shore to the cultivated and refined crowds who come and go in thousands on the same spot, and the contrast is as astonishing as the extinction of the aboriginal race is melancholy. ”

“ Everybody rode down to eat his trout, and make love in the dark shades of his mirrored lagoon; and, at last, in self-defence, he added a room or two to his shanty, enclosed his cabbage-garden, and set a price on his trout dinners. The traveller, now-a-days, who has not dined at Barhydt’s, with his own champagne cold from the tarn, and the white-headed old settler ‘gargling’ Dutch about the house in his maniform vocation of cook, ostler, and waiter, may as well not have seen Niagara. ”

“ Distance lends more enchantment to a view of Washington than to most other views. Covering a good deal of ground, possessing two or three very fine points in itself, and lying in the centre of a superb outer circle of scenery, it has all the qualities which a draftsman could desire for his sketch. ”

“ Herr Barhydt is an old Dutch settler, who, till the mineral springs of Saratoga were discovered some four miles from his door, was buried in the depth of a forest unknown to all but the prowling Indian. The sky is supported above him, (or looks to be,) by a wilderness of straight columnar pine-shafts, gigantic in girth, and with no foliage except at the top, where they branch out like round tables spread for a banquet in the clouds. ”

“ The sleigh plunged on after them, stopping dead and short at every other moment, and reeling over the heavy drifts like a boat in a surging sea. A finer crystallization had meanwhile taken place upon the surface of the moist snow; and the powdered particles flew almost insensibly on the blasts of wind, filling the eyes and hair, and cutting the skin with a sensation like the touch of needle-points. The driver, and his maddened but almost exhausted team, were blinded by the glittering and whirling eddies; the cold grew intenser every moment, the forward motion gradually less and less ”

“ The border is necessarily curved, from the evenness of the impression of the river on a soft soil; and the edge is fringed with shrubs. A great part of them are formed into meadows, which are more profitable, and, at the same time, more agreeable to the eye than any other mode of culture. The magnificent elms, for which this country is remarkable, stand singly in the fields; while orchards and groves serve to break the uniformity. ”

“ But the distant finishing which nature has given to the picture, is of a very different character; it is a true contrast to the foreground; it is as placid and delightful as that is wild and tremendous; for the mountain being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach and participate of the calm below. Here the eye ultimately composes itself ”

“ General Morris is not less successful in the lighter and livelier freaks of poetic fancy, as we hope to prove by a quotation from “The New York Mirror,” in which the moral of the lines is not their least merit. The melodies of the various birds which roost among the wild recesses of the rocks, or haunt the mountain forest, or sweep along the waters, are sent forth hourly in sounds of “unwritten music.” But the cry “most musical, most melancholy,” comes at the twilight hour from the clear throat of the whip-poor-will, at intervals, through the summer’s night: nor is it ever heard or seen by day ”

“ I have amused my artist friend since he has been here, with an entertainment not quite as expensive as the Holly Lodge fireworks, but quite as beautiful—the burning of log-heaps. Instead of gossipping over the tea-table these long and chilly evenings, the three or four young men who have been staying with us, were very content to tramp into the woods, with a bundle of straw and a match-box; and they have been initiated into the mysteries of ‘picking and piling,’ to the considerable improvement of the glebe of Glenmary. ”

“ Fiction shall then fling its imaginative veil over the things we have seen—covering, but not concealing them—and, in the plenitude of poetic genius, people the drama of futurity with a thousand exquisite creations, clothed in the venerated garb of antiquity.
Undercliff, the mansion of General George P. Morris, which forms the principal object in the engraving, is situated upon an elevated plateau, rising from the eastern shore of the river; and the selection of such a commanding and beautiful position at once decides the taste of its intellectual proprietor. ”

“ In the view of Undercliff, the artist has been peculiarly happy in producing an effect at once brilliant and chaste. The broken foreground is agreeably relieved by the sparkling transparency of the water: the receding figures on the shore are judiciously introduced to mark the perspective. The projecting bluff in the middle distance is thrown into shadow, and stands out in fine contrast from the light horizon, while the lights upon the solitary rock, the entrance gate, the mansion, and the vessels, produce the effect of a setting sun ”

“ You cross the Potomac above the junction, pass along its side through the base of the mountain for three miles, its terrible precipices hanging in fragments over you, and, within about twenty miles, reach Fredericktown, and the fine country round that. This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic; yet here, as in the neighbourhood of the Natural Bridge, are people who have passed their lives within half a dozen miles, and have never been to survey these monuments of a war between rivers and mountains, which must have shaken the earth itself to its centre. ”

“ During the absence of the Indian, who was the one that claimed me, the other, who remained with me, and who was the murderer of my last boy, took from his bosom his scalp, and prepared a hoop, and stretched the scalp upon it. Those mothers who have not seen the like done by one of the scalps of their own children, (and few, if any, ever had so much misery to endure,) will be able to form but faint ideas of the feelings which then harrowed up my soul! ”

“ I have often thought in passing, of the contrast between these numerous advents and the landing of Hendrick Hudson on this very spot, in his voyage of discovery up the river. He found here, he says, “a very loving people, and a very old man,” by whom he and his crew were very kindly entertained. From the first step of a white man’s foot on the soil to the crowded rush of passengers from a steam-boat—from a savage wilderness to the height of civilization and science, it is but a little more than two hundred years of rapid history. ”

“ In the hour of security and sleep, when your deadly enemies are supposed to be friends, quietly fishing and hunting—when they are believed to be far off, and thoughtless of you and yours, your sleep is suddenly broken by the war-whoop, your house and village set on fire, your family and friends butchered, and yourself escape only to be carried into captivity, and wrung with every species of torture. ”

“ The noise is so tremendous, that I cannot conceive how people can fix their dwellings in the immediate neighbourhood. There is a long bridge over the roaring floods, which vibrates incessantly; and clusters of saw-mills deform the scene. There is stone-cutting as well as planking done at these mills. The fine black marble of the place is cut into slabs, and sent down to New York to be polished. ”

“ Can we not fancy the feelings with which some strong-minded savage, who should have ascended the summit of the mountain in company with a friendly settler, contemplating the progress already made by the white man, and marking the gigantic strides with which he was advancing into the wilderness, should fold his arms and say, ‘White man, there is eternal war between me and thee! ”