The dark pile of old Cro' Nest, guarding the northern side of West
Point, rises fourteen hundred and eighteen feet, one of the noblest
mountains of the Highlands. Beyond it, the Storm King and Mount Taurus
are the northern portals of the pass, with Pollopell's Island, rocky
and tree-clad, lying in the river between, and farther on the distant
hazy shores enclosing Newburg Bay. These buttresses of the northern
entrance solidly rise as protectors of the pass into the valley:
"Mountains that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land."
On the northern side of the promontory making the Point, upon a little
level plain above the cliffs, overlooking the river, and almost under
the shadow of old Cro' Nest, is the West Point Cemetery. Here is
buried General Winfield Scott. Upon the Parade Ground is the Battle
Monument, erected in 1894, a column seventy-eight feet high,
surmounted by a statue of Victory. Down along the most beautiful part
of the shore at the Point, and leading to Kosciusko's Garden, a
favorite resort of the Polish officer, is the secluded path which
generations of impulsive young cadets have known as the "Flirtation
Walk." Beginning at the roadway, high on the bluff, overlooking the
river, it winds with devious turns down the declivity, and after
curving around the promontory near the water's edge, sweeps grandly up
the incline again. This trysting-path leads under a lacework of
foliage, giving it pleasant and meditative gloom even when the sun
shines brightly. Over across the river is the village of Cold Spring,
having both above and below the shores rising steeply, and hung upon
the edge is the pretty Church of St. Mary's, with its columned portico
and surmounting belfry. Nearby the railway running along the shore
pierces a tunnel through a rugged protruding rock. Here is the Cold
Spring foundry that makes cannon for the army. Almost under the Parade
Ground on the northern side is the Siege Battery, where the guns in
time of artillery practice carry on a noisy and reverberating
warfare across the Cove against the dark and towering side of old Cro'
Nest. This grand mountain, the target for the youthful gunners,
inspired the muse of George P. Morris, the lyric poet of the
Highlands, whose delightful home was at Undercliff, across the river
above, at the foot of Mount Taurus. His eyes perpetually feasted upon
the view of this peak, and thus he described it:
"Where Hudson's wave o'er silvery sands
Winds through the hills afar,
Old Cro' Nest like a monarch stands
Crowned with a single star."
[Illustration: _Up the Hudson from the Water Battery, West Point_]
The northern portal of the Highlands is guarded on either hand by the
Storm King, rising fifteen hundred and twenty-nine feet, and Mount
Taurus, fifteen hundred and eighty-six feet. There are also a galaxy
of attendant peaks. Beyond Mount Taurus is Breakneck Hill, rising
nearly twelve hundred feet, with a chain of mountains stretching far
to the northeast, among them the Old Beacon and the towering Grand
Sachem, sixteen hundred and eighty feet high. The Storm King was the
old Boter-Berg of the early Dutch, thus named because, to their
matter-of-fact minds, the mountain resembled nothing so much as a huge
lump of butter. Similarly, the eastern portal of the pass was Bull
Mountain originally, but has since been more classically transformed
into Mount Taurus. The ancient Knickerbocker legend records how the
primitive inhabitants chased a wild bull around this mountain to the
peak beyond it, where he fell and broke his neck, thus naming both of
them, though Breakneck Hill yet awaits a more classic transformation.
The geologists tell us that in early ages, like the Minisink of the
Delaware, the region north of the Highlands adjacent to the Hudson
Valley was a vast lake, extending back to Lake Champlain, which still
remains as a fragment of the inland sea, following the melting of the
great glacier. To get a southern outlet, the river broke through the
mountain barrier and formed the winding and romantic Highland Pass.
There is a grand outlook from the summit of the Storm King over this
valley to the northward. The river expands into the beautiful Newburg
Bay, its most perfect land-locked harbor, and its course can be traced
through the "Long Reach" for more than twenty miles, a broad, straight
stream between the pleasant banks, up to Crom Elbow, the "Krom
Elleboge" of the original Dutch colonists. Villages dot the shores,
and fertile fields stretch up on either hand, while hung in mid air,
far away across the water, is the distant, slender, spider-like span
of the high railway bridge at Poughkeepsie, the route by the "back
door" into New England, which has gone through such serious throes of
reconstruction. Upon the left hand the Catskills, and upon the right
hand the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts, bound the distant
horizon. Behind, and to the southward, the river can be traced as it
winds through the Highlands down to Anthony's Nose, while nearer, one
can look into the depression on top of the adjoining mountain, within
a surrounding amphitheatre of peaks that makes the striking
resemblance giving the significant name to the old Cro' Nest.