Through a Realm of Beauty, Romance
and History with our sweetest
writer and noblest voyager
For many years it has been the delight of our Hudson River dwellers
and of all world-wide readers in every state and in many lands, to
make delightful excursions of fancy “Along the Hudson with Washington
Irving.” It was, therefore, a beautiful thought of the Hudson River Day
Line to convert this fancy into fact and to make our journeys “Along
the Hudson with Washington Irving,” a _delightful reality_ by the
launching of a noble steamer bearing our illustrious writer’s name,
so that we all become today _real voyagers_ with _him_, and as it
were, personally conducted among the mountains, valleys and streams,
illuminated and glorified by his sunny genius and eventful life.
It was also a splendid idea of the Hudson River Day Line management to
construct and name their three superb steamers in natural and historic
sequence as related to the river, to wit:
“Hendrick Hudson”--Our Discoverer.
“Robert Fulton”--Our Inventor.
“Washington Irving”--Our Portrayer and Voyager.
From Washington Irving’s much loved Manhattan to the historic Highlands
and the romantic Catskills, the very breezes are vocal with his
utterances, and we esteem it a great privilege by the mere crossing
of a poetic “gang-plank of memory” to pass at once from Dreamland to
Reality and thereby spend a delightful day in his companionship and
listen to his cheery words which still flow sweetly from his own lips
as he recounts to us the romance and story of our noble River.
“I thank God,” exclaims Washington Irving, “that I was born on the
banks of the Hudson, for I fancy I can trace much that is good and
pleasant in my heterogeneous compound to my early companionship with
this glorious river.”
It will be remembered that a short walk from his Birthplace, 119
William St., would take the active lad in three or four minutes
through the old Trinity churchyard or across open fields from his
very doorstep to the bank of the river; so that all Manhattan was in
fact his dooryard and the entire valley of the Hudson his dream land.
It may now also be fittingly recalled that Washington Irving seemed
especially foreordained by ancestry, home and association for the noble
mission that awaited him. On his eventful birthday April 5, 1783, his
patriotic mother said to his father “General Washington’s great work is
now completed and we will call our little boy Washington Irving.” The
worthy woman who had distributed food to the starving soldiers of the
American Revolution cruelly confined in the loathsome British Prison
ships of New York divined the right name for her little boy in the
cradle; this happy christening led to an early and memorable meeting
of the distinguished General and his little namesake, for Washington
Irving now tells us how.
“A young Scotch maid servant of the family, struck with the enthusiasm
which everywhere greeted General Washington’s arrival in New York,
determined to present the child to his distinguished namesake.
Accordingly she followed him one morning and leading by the hand
the lad who had scarce outgrown his virgin trousers, said “Please,
your honor, here’s a bairn was named after you.” In the estimation
of Lizzie, for so she was called, few claims of kindred could be
stronger than this. Washington did not disdain the delicate affinity,
and placing his hand on the head of her little charge, gave him his
blessing.”
The distinguished hero of Yorktown and the first President of our
Republic little dreamed that the good Scotch nurse led by the hand that
morning one destined to laurel his own history, to depict the great
deeds of the Revolutionary struggle and to transmit, as it were, by
personal touch, a work which in reverent love and sympathetic narration
would stand alone, not only in American literature, but also in the
annals of the world’s history of freedom.
Were I an artist I know of no finer group in our entire American story
than this of the great General and the bright eyed lad attended by his
nurse in her Tartan plaid standing at the doorway of the old Trinity
Church appropriately framed amid the old-time picturesque buildings
of the lower Broadway of our Revolutionary days. That greeting and
blessing was a “laying on of hands” never to be forgotten and a noble
dedication for the great work the lad was to accomplish.