A recent writer has said:  “The Palisades are among the wonders of the world.  Only three other places equal them in importance, but each of the four is different from the others, and the Palisades are unique.  The Giant’s Causeway on the north coast of Ireland, and the cliffs at Kawaddy in India, are thought by many to have been the result of the same upheaval of nature as the Palisades; but the Hudson rocks seem to have preserved their entirety—­to have come up in a body, as it were—­while the Giant’s Causeway owes its celebrity to the ruined state in which the Titanic forces of nature have left it.  The third wonder is at Staffa, in Scotland, where the rocks have been thrown into such a position as to justify the name of Fingal’s Cave, which they bear, and which was bestowed on them in the olden times before Scottish history began to be written.  It is singular how many of the names which dignify, or designate, favorite spots of the Giant’s Causeway have been duplicated in the Palisades.  Among the Hudson rocks are several ‘Lady’s Chairs,’ ‘Lover’s Leaps,’ ‘Devil’s Toothpicks,’ ‘Devil’s Pulpits,’ and, in many spots on the water’s edge, especially those most openly exposed to the weather, we see exactly the same conformations which excite admiration and wonder in the Irish rocks.”

* * *

  Where the mighty cliffs look upward in their glory and their glow
  I see a wondrous river in its beauty southward flow.

  Thomas C. Harbaugh.

* * *

Under the base of these cliffs William Cullen Bryant one Sabbath morning wrote his beautiful lines: 

  “Cool shades and dews are round my way,
  And silence of the early day;
  Mid the dark rocks that watch his bed,
  Glitters the mighty Hudson spread,
  Unrippled, save by drops that fall
  From shrubs that fringe his mountain wall;
  And o’er the clear, still water swells
  The music of the Sabbath bells.

  All, save this little nook of land,
  Circled with trees, on which I stand;
  All, save that line of hills which lie
  Suspended in the mimic sky—­
  Seems a blue void, above, below,
  Through which the white clouds come and go;
  And from the green world’s farthest steep
  I gaze into the airy deep.”

* * *

    A mellow sunset was settling upon the hills and
    waters and a thousand flashes played over the distant
    city as its spires and prominent objects caught its glow.

    N.  P. Willis.

* * *

There are many strange stories connected with the Palisades, and one narrator says:  “remarkable disappearances have occurred in the vicinity that have never been explained.  On a conical-shaped rock near Clinton Point a young man and a young woman were seen standing some half a century ago.  Several of their friends, who were back some thirty feet from the face of the cliff, saw them distinctly, and called