It was a happy thought to build the Hudson river railroad right
along the shore. The grade is already made by nature; you are sure of
ventilation one side--and you are in nobody's way. I see, hear, the
locomotives and cars, rumbling, roaring, flaming, smoking, constantly,
away off there, night and day--less than a mile distant, and in full
view by day. I like both sight and sound. Express trains thunder and
lighten along; of freight trains, most of them very long, there cannot
be less than a hundred a day. At night far down you see the headlight
approaching, coming steadily on like a meteor. The river at night has
its special character-beauties. The shad fishermen go forth in their
boats and pay out their nets--one sitting forward, rowing, and one
standing up aft dropping it properly-marking the line with little
floats bearing candles, conveying, as they glide over the water, an
indescribable sentiment and doubled brightness. I like to watch the tows
at night, too, with their twinkling lamps, and hear the husky panting
of the steamers; or catch the sloops' and schooners' shadowy forms, like
phantoms, white, silent, indefinite, out there. Then the Hudson of a
clear moonlight night.
But there is one sight the very grandest. Sometimes in the fiercest
driving storm of wind, rain, hail or snow, a great eagle will appear
over the river, now soaring with steady and now overbended wings--always
confronting the gale, or perhaps cleaving into, or at times literally
_sitting_ upon it. It is like reading some first-class natural tragedy
or epic, or hearing martial trumpets. The splendid bird enjoys the
hubbub--is adjusted and equal to it--finishes it so artistically.
His pinions just oscillating--the position of his head and neck--his
resistless, occasionally varied flight--now a swirl, now an upward
movement--the black clouds driving--the angry wash below--the hiss
of rain, the wind's piping (perhaps the ice colliding, grunting)--he
tacking or jibing--now, as it were, for a change, abandoning himself to
the gale, moving with it with such velocity--and now, resuming control,
he comes up against it, lord of the situation and the storm--lord, amid
it, of power and savage joy.
Sometimes (as at present writing,) middle of sunny afternoon, the
old "Vanderbilt" steamer stalking ahead--I plainly hear her rhythmic,
slushing paddles--drawing by long hawsers an immense and varied
following string, ("an old sow and pigs," the river folks call it.)
First comes a big barge, with a house built on it, and spars towering
over the roof; then canal boats, a lengthen'd, clustering train,
fasten'd and link'd together--the one in the middle, with high staff,
flaunting a broad and gaudy flag--others with the almost invariable
lines of new-wash'd clothes, drying; two sloops and a schooner aside the
tow--little wind, and that adverse--with three long, dark, empty barges
bringing up the rear. People are on the boats: men lounging, women in
sun-bonnets, children, stovepipes with streaming smoke.