Page:The knickerbocker (IA knickerbocker00agne).pdf/72

his love, and that parents and friends should believe that the kind Shepherd is folding the lamb in his own arms.

But now, amid these musings, the boat has borne us out into the lake-like Zee, on whose eastern shore nestles the unpretending but shrine-destined home of Irving, whose fame is wide as the world, and enduring as time and eternity too.

Here, the gentle, undulating banks of the river nearer its mouth, loom up into loftier hills and even precipitous cliffs, until you enter the narrow channel which terminates the Zee, at Verplanck's Point, and rounding into the Peekskill Bay, you find yourself, at once, in the presence of the towering Highlands, stray spurs of the mountain-ranges of the Alleghanies.

What a river is the Hudson, in the story of its discovery, its first settlements, its revolutionary memories, its sloop navigation, and then its steamboat exploits, its deep, wide waters, its gigantic Palisades, its once wild, uncultured banks, where the Indian roamed, its now beauteous culture, with its palatial homes!

Without castles, indeed, gray with age, and toppling to the dust, to tell of the past of feudalism and fight, it has its better monuments, to speak for 'freedom to worship God,' and to write, in its present, the most brilliant promise of the future.