Our historic journey fittingly begins at Desbrosses Street, for here, near the old River-front, extending from Desbrosses along Greenwich, stood the Revolutionary line of breastworks reaching south to the Grenadier Battery at Franklin Street.  Below this were “Jersey,” “McDougall” and “Oyster” batteries and intervening earthworks to Port George, on the Battery, which stood on the site of old Fort Amsterdam, carrying us back to Knickerbocker memories of Peter Stuyvesant and Wowter Van Twiller.  The view from the after-deck, before the steamer leaves the pier, gives scope for the imagination to re-picture the far-away primitive and heroic days of early New York.

=Desbrosses Street Pier.=—­On leaving the lower landing a charming view is obtained of New York Harbor, the Narrows, Staten Island, the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty, and, in clear weather, far away to the South, the Highlands of Nevisink, the first land to greet the eye of the ocean voyager.  As the steamer swings out into the stream the tourist is at once face to face with a rapidly changing panorama.  Steamers arriving, with happy faces on their decks, from southern ports or distant lands; others with waving handkerchiefs bidding good-bye to friends on crowded docks; swift-shuttled ferry-boats, with hurrying passengers, supplying their homespun woof to the great warp of foreign or coastwise commerce; noisy tug-boats, sombre as dray horses, drawing long lines of canal boats, or proud in the convoy of some Atlantic greyhound that has not yet slipped its leash; dignified “Men of War” at anchor, flying the flags of many nations, happy excursion boats en route to sea-side resorts, scows, picturesque in their very clumsiness and uncouthness—­all unite in a living kaleidescope of beauty.

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  Rise, stately symbol!  Holding forth
    Thy light and hope to all who sit
  In chains and darkness!  Belt the earth
    With watch-fires from thy torch uplit!

  John Greenleaf Whittier.

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Across the river on the Jersey Shore are seen extensive docks of great railways, with elevators and stations that seem like “knotted ends” of vast railway lines, lest they might forsooth, untwist and become irrecoverably tangled in approaching the Metropolis.  Prominent among these are the Pennsylvania Railroad for the South and West; the Erie Railway, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western, and to the North above Hoboken the West Shore, serving also as starting point for the New York, Ontario and Western.  Again the eye returns to the crowded wharves and warehouses of New York, reaching from Castle Garden beyond 30th Street, with forest-like masts and funnels of ocean steamships, and then to prominent buildings mounting higher and higher year by year along the city horizon, marking the course of Broadway from the Battery, literally fulfilling the humor of Knickerbocker in not leaving space for a breath of air for the top of old Trinity Church spire.