Long Island

“ Long Island and spring—the conjunction gives us a particular thrill. There are more beautiful places than the Long Island flats, but it was there that we earned our first pay envelope, and it was there that we first set up housekeeping; and as long as we live the station platform of Jamaica will move us strangely—not merely from one train to another, but also inwardly. There is no soil that receives a more brimming benison of sunshine than Long Island in late April. As the train moves across the plain it seems to swim in a golden tide of light. ”

“ To the northeast, New York extends her relations by the sheltered avenue of Long Island Sound,—alluring through a strait of comparatively smooth water not only the agricultural products which seek export along a double water-front of two hundred miles, but the larger results of that colossal manufacturing system on which is based the prosperity of New England. To a great part of this class of values Long Island Sound stands like a weir emptying into the net of New York. ”

“ Just the spot of earth you spring from. He loves this New England.”
“And I love Long Island. I was born there, not at the Cove, but farther down the coast near Montauk Point, and the smell of salt water and the marshes always stirs me. I love the long green rolling stretches, and the little low hills in the background like you see in paintings of the Channel Islands and some of the ones along the Scotch coast. Just a few straggly scrub pines, you know, and the willows and wild cherry trees and beach plums.”
“Somewhere I’ve read about that, girls; the old earth’s hold upon her children. ”

“ On this spot the city is built. The hills of Groton, and the low sands of Waterford, extend on either hand like outstretched arms around the harbor. Fisher's Island stands back as an additional embankment on the east. Other small islands of the Sound recede into dark specks upon its bosom, and the narrow line of Long Island, lying like the edge of a slender cloud upon the limits of the horizon, vary the prospect with the elements of beauty and grandeur.
Fort Trumbull occupies an eligible situation for the protection of the harbor and town. ”

“ Long Island stretches into the sea for the most part east by south and east-southeast. None of its land is very high, for you must be nearly opposite Sandy Hook before you can see it. There is a hill or ridge running lengthwise through the island, nearest the north side and west end of the island. The south side and east end are more flat. The water by which it is separated from the Mahatans, is improperly called the East River, for it is nothing else than an arm of the sea, beginning in the bay on the west and ending in the sea on the east. ”

“ Only the other day we heard a wise man say that he did not care for Long Island, because one has to travel through a number of half-built suburbs before getting into real country. We felt, when he said it, that it would be impossible for us to tell him how much some of those growing suburbs mean to us, for we have lived in them. There is not one of those little frame dwellings that doesn't give us a thrill as we buzz past them. If you voyage from Brooklyn, as we do, you will have noticed two stations (near Jamaica) called Clarenceville and Morris Park. ”

“ But even the veriest landsman of them all can enjoy the passage of Long Island Sound in one of these stately and stable vessels, whether sitting indoors listening to the excellent band in one of the spacious drawing-rooms in which there is absolutely no rude reminder of the sea, or on deck on a cool summer night watching the lights of New York gradually vanish in the black wake, or the moon riding triumphantly as queen of the heavenly host, and the innumerable twinkling beacons that safeguard our course. ”

“ I'll send her old man on a bus ride while I show her a good time along the great white way—and then to Zim's place! Poor little motherless girl—never has been to the big town in all her life—and lives only fifty miles away! The old man can drift for himself, after his bus ride. Ye Gods! Long Island holds thousands of them who never have seen lil' ol' n'york—hic! Poor lil' country baby—I love her—no use to marry, she hasn't any money. Love gets cold when you run out o' gold—sounds like a song-hic! ”

“ Faint perfume from Long Island woodlands, wandering puffs of wind from salt meadows freshened the city streets; St. Felix Street boasted a lilac bush in leaf; Oxford Street was gay with hyacinths and a winter-battered butterfly; and in Fort Greene Place the grassy door-yards were exquisite with crocus bloom. Peace, good-will, and spring on earth; but in men's souls a silence as of winter.
To Northland folk the unclosing buds of April brought no awakening; lethargy fettered all, arresting vigour, sapping desire. ”

“ Long Island is itself but one long dirt-heap: an accumulated pile of continental débris, sand, clay, gravel, intermixed and overlaid by bowlders, is here gathered together into a more or less stratified state, as if, in an enormous denudation of New England, the aggregated material, scoured from its hills and valleys, had been dropped just upon their outskirts in this long detrital barrow or mound. Yet over New England this same deposit is wide-spread ”

“ Few parts of the island are summer resorts in the ordinary use of the word; there are large hotels hardly anywhere save on Coney Island, at Far Rockaway, on Long Beach and on Shelter Island; and a large part of the summer population lives in private mansions. Some Long Island “country places” are huge estates with game and fish preserves and luxurious “châteaux.” The roads are good. The course of the Vanderbilt automobile races is along the roads of the Hempstead Plains. ”

“ It was a brilliant day, with a glorious blue sky overhead and a bracing breeze out of the east. Just beyond Long Island a low stratum of miasmic gray was the only shred of the usual fog to be seen on the whole horizon. In the little roadstead the vessels, black-hulled or white, rode eagerly and gracefully at their moorings, the bright sun bringing out the red, yellow, green, blue, and brown of the dories nested amidships.
At seven o’clock the steamer Grande Mignon blew a great blast of her whistle, cast off her lines, and cleared for St. Andrew’s and St. Stephens. ”

“ This island was originally the "Governor's garden," and Winthrop paid a yearly rent of two bushels of apples for it. These forts are nearly all constructed of Quincy granite, but none has seen actual warfare. Long Island spreads its high crags across the harbor, outside of the inner forts, and has a lighthouse on its northern end, while to the eastward is a low, rocky islet, bearing as a warning to the mariner a curious 33 stone monument, known as Nix's Mate. It was here the colonists used to hang the pirates caught on the New England coasts. ”

“ We do not know the geological history of this place, but imagine that the rest of Long Island is the discourse of which East Hampton is the peroration. There are enough bluffs to relieve the dead level, enough grass to clothe the hills, enough trees to drop the shadow, enough society to keep one from inanity, and enough quietude to soothe twelve months of perturbation. The sea hums us to sleep at night, and fills our dreams with intimations of the land where the harmony is like "the voice of many waters." ”

“ On the opposite side of the narrow channel on the east, lies Long Island, hilly and picturesque, and which, besides Brooklyn, possesses a large number of villas of wealthy citizens scattered about among gardens and pleasure-grounds. To this island, as charming a retreat of families from New York, as are the Highland borders of the Clyde for the citizens of Glasgow, we have to follow Mosher and Douglas, the reputed abductors of Charley Ross. ”

“ The bold character of the coast of Rhode Island and its picturesque effects are wholly unknown upon its neighbor Long Island. The endless reach of sand and the monotony of the vast level land on Long Island have a certain vague charm as of a sea-shore becoming or about to become picturesque. ”

“ In the east a band of pallid light lifted up out of the night, and the horizon took shape against it, stark and black. Slowly, stealthily, the formless dawn dusk spread over the sleeping world; to the zenith the light-smitten stars reeled and died, and houses, fields, and thoroughfares lay a-glimmer with ghostly twilight as the car tore headlong through the grim, unlovely, silent hinterland of Long Island City.
The gates of the ferry-house were inexorably shut against them when at last Maitland brought the big machine to a tremulous and panting halt, like that of an over-driven thoroughbred. ”

“ Long Island, that narrow fork of land running eastward and separated from the southern shore of Connecticut by the Long Island Sound, a shallow and turbulent trough, is lined, alike on its southern and northern edges, with bowlders, while its backbone of low hills is also strewed with their débris. They occur gathered together in groups forming topographical features in the landscape, and single ones have a weight of 2,000 tons. ”

“ The road leads up over a sort of plateau; a wide expanse of country can be viewed in all directions, but there are only more fields to see, more farm-houses and squatty barns, perhaps a village church steeple in the distance, a village that has its oldest inhabitant and a church with a church-yard. Away off to the north, across a gleaming strip of water, which the map shows to be Long Island Sound, lie the blue hills of the Bronx. They, too, are well within Greater New York. So is all that country to the southwest, far beyond the range of the eye, Jamaica, and Jamaica Bay and Coney Island. ”

“ Along the Long Island coast lay the haze of early autumn. It was the time of lassitude. In the season of ripening and decay Nature seemed to have lost her spring, and lay in a sort of delicious languor. Sea and shore were in a kind of truce, and the ocean south wind brought cool refreshment but no incentive.
From the sea the old brown farmhouse seemed a snug haven of refuge; from the inland road it appeared, with its spreading, sloping roofs, like an ancient sea-craft come ashore, which had been covered in and then embowered by kindly Nature with foliage. ”

“ Since my last have explored Long Island, City of New York and island unto the ten mile stone to Tryons Quarters where I received his threats for comeing their that made me almost tremble knowing my situation and business but blessed be God have been prosperd and particularly successful in ingaging a faithful friend and one of the first characters in the City to make it his business and keep his eyes upon every movement and assist me in all respects and meet and consult weekly in or near the city. ”

“ It was the beach's most crowded hour and the short strip of sand in front of the most fashionable and uncomfortable place to bathe on Long Island was gay as a patch of exhibition sweet-peas with every shade of vivid or delicate color. It was a triumph of women—the whole glittering, moving bouquet of stripes and patterns and tints that wandered slowly from one striped parasol-mushroom to the next—the men, in their bathing suits or white flannels seemed as unimportant if necessary furniture as slaves in an Eastern court. ”

“ Long Island is not as rich in flowers as the valley of the Hudson. Yet there are many. Early in April there is one hillside near us which glows like a tender flame with the white of the bloodroot. About the same time we find the shy mayflower, the trailing arbutus; and although we rarely pick wild flowers, one member of the household always plucks a little bunch of mayflowers to send to a friend working in Panama, whose soul hungers for the Northern spring. ”

“ On the southern shore of Long Island, who has not seen the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy as apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New York, the color of that Atlantic is drenching.
The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty that never fades, but I hate the New York skyline except at night. In the day-time those punctured walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the river with such a lidless, such an inhuman, stare. Nothing of man clings to them. They are barren as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. ”

“ Long Island isn’t the biggest stretch of country in the world, but there’s over a hundred miles of it as to length, and I guess you can keep busy. Besides, the towns are near together and you’ll be able to find good sleeping accommodations; and I’d rather Dan didn’t do too much sleeping out of doors just at first. ”

“ This line of slightly elevated downs was Long Island, a great sandy bank enlivened with vegetation, which stretches along the American coast from Montauk Point to Brooklyn, adjoining New York. Several yachts were coasting along this island, which is covered with villas and pleasure-houses, the favourite resorts of the New Yorkists.
Every passenger waved his hand to the land so longed for after the tedious voyage, which had not been exempt from painful accidents. Every telescope was directed towards this first specimen of the American continent, and each saw it under a different aspect. ”

“ In the case of Van Gelder, it led to no useful results; in that of my respected relative—had he lived—it would have culminated in the production of a work of research, which would have shed undying light on the history of Long Island, and would have been a blessing to future generations.
About thirty miles from the city of New-York is a headland jutting out into Long Island Sound, fortified against the wash of the sea by huge boulders of rock. The banks of the shore are rough and rugged, and bear marks of the wear and tear of the waves. ”

“ The Long Island railway serves the principal villages of the township, Mattituck, Cutchogue, Peconic, Southold and Green- port (pop. in 1910, 3089) , and from Greenport steamers run to Shelter Island, Sag Harbor, New London and New York. Beyond Greenport are the villages of East Marion and Orient. Greenport has some shipping and some oyster fisheries, as- paragus is grown at Mattituck, and Peconic Bay is noted for its scallops. Southold is a summer resort, and it is historically interesting as one of the first English settlements on Long Island. ”