As the steamer passes under the bridge the traveler will see on the left Highland station (West Shore Railroad) and above this the old landing of New Paltz.  A well traveled road winds from the ferry and the station, up a narrow defile by the side of a dashing stream, broken here and there in waterfalls, to Highland Village, New Paltz and Lake Mohonk. The Bridge and Trolley Line from Poughkeepsie make a most delightful excursion to New Paltz, on the Wallkill, seat of one of the State normal colleges.

* * *

  My thoughts go back to thee, oh lovely lake,
  Lake of the Sky Top! as thy beauties break
  Upon the traveller of thy mountain road,
  While sunset gilds thee, vision never fairer glowed!

  Alfred B. Street.

* * *

Prominent among many pleasant residences above Poughkeepsie are:  Mrs. F. J. Allen’s of New York, Mrs. John F. Winslow’s, Mrs. Thomas Newbold’s, J. Roosevelt’s and Archie Rogers’.  The large red buildings above the Poughkeepsie water works are the Hudson River State Hospital.  Passing Crum Elbow Point on the left and the Sisters of the White Cross Orphan Asylum, we see

=Hyde Park=, 80 miles from New York, on the east bank, named some say, in honor of Lady Ann Hyde; according to others, after Sir Edward Hyde, one of the early British Governors of the colony.  The first prominent place above Hyde Park, is Frederick W. Vanderbilt’s, with Corinthian columns; and above this “Placentia,” once the home of James K. Paulding.

Immediately opposite “Placentia,” at West Park on the west bank, is the home of John Burroughs, our sweetest essayist, the nineteenth century’s “White of Selborne.”  Judge Barnard of Poughkeepsie, once said to the author of this handbook, “The best writer America has produced after Hawthorne is John Burroughs; I wish I could see him.”  It so happened that there had been an important “bank” suit a day or two previous in Poughkeepsie which was tried before the judge in which Mr. Burroughs had appeared as an important witness.  The judge was reminded of this fact when he remarked with a few emphatic words, the absence of which seems to materially weaken the sentence:  “Was that Burroughs?  Well, well, I wish I had known it.”

* * *

  How soothing is this solitude
  With nature in her wildest mood,
  Where Hudson deep, majestic, wide,
  Pours to the sea his monarch tide.

  William Wilson.

* * *

=Mount Hymettus=, overlooking West Park, so named by “the author and naturalist,” has indeed been to him a successful hunting-ground for bees and wild honey, and will be long remembered for sweeter stores of honey encombed and presented in enduring type.  Washington Irving says of the early poets of Britain that “a spray could not tremble in the breeze, or a leaf rustle to the ground, that was not seen by these delicate observers and wrought up into some beautiful morality.”  So John Burroughs has studied the Hudson in all its moods, knowing well that it is not to be wooed and won in a single day.  How clear this is seen in his articles on “Our River”: