View From The Mountain House, Catskill

View From The Mountain House, Catskill   

Reproduced from a 7" x 4¾" Steel Engraving

from a Drawing by W.H. Bartlett

 View From The Mountain House, Catskill is Print # 52 of 53 from
Volume II "AMERICAN SCENERY" or LAND,LAKE, AND RIVER

Published in 1839 by George Virtue, 26 Ivy Lane, London

This is a exact copy of the original 1839 text describing the above Print, from
Volume II "AMERICAN SCENERY" or Land, Lake, and River

in the following masterly description, by Miss Martineau, is said all, and the best that can be said, of the glorious view from the Mountain-House at Catskill.

 " After tea, I went out upon the platform in front of the house, having been warned not to go too near the edge, so as to fall an unmeasured depth into the forest below. I sat upon the edge as a security against stepping over unawares. The stars were bright overhead, and had conquered half the sky, giving promise of what we ardently desired, a fine morrow. Over the other half, the mass of thunder-clouds was, I supposed, heaped together; for I could at first discern nothing of the champaign which I knew must be stretched below. Suddenly, and from that moment incessantly, gushes of red lightning poured out from the cloudy canopy, revealing, not merely the horizon, but the course of the river, in all its windings through the valley. This thread of river, thus illuminated, looked like a flash of lightning caught by some strong hand and laid along in the valley.

 " All the principal features of the landscape might, no doubt, have been discerned by this sulphureous light; but my whole attention was absorbed by the river, which seemed to come out of the darkness, like an apparition, at the summons of my impatient will. It could be borne only for a short time—this dazzling, bewil­dering alternation of glare and blackness, of vast reality and nothingness. I was soon glad to draw back from the precipice, and seek the candle-light within.

 " The next day was Sunday. I shall never forget, if I live to a hundred, how the world lay at our feet one Sunday morning. I rose very early, and looked abroad from my window, two stories above the platform. A dense fog, exactly level with my eyes, as it appeared, roofed in the whole plain of the earth—a dusky firmament, in which the stars had hidden themselves for the day. Such is the account which an antediluvian spectator would probably have given of it. This solid firmament had spaces in it, however, through which gushes of sun-light were poured, lighting up the spires of white churches, and clusters of farm-buildings, too small to be otherwise distinguished; and especially the river, with its sloops, floating like motes in the sun-beam. The firmament rose and melted, or parted off into the likeness of snowy sky-mountains, and left the cool Sabbath to brood brightly over the land. What human interest sanctifies a bird's-eye view! I suppose this is its peculiar charm; for its charm is found to deepen in proportion to the growth of mind. To an infant, a champaign of a hundred miles is not so much as a yard square of gay carpet. To the rustic, it is less bewitching than a paddock with two cows. To the philosopher, what is it not ? As he casts his eye over its glittering towns, its scattered hamlets, its secluded homes, its mountain ranges, church spires, and untrodden forests, it is a picture of life; an epitome of the human universe; the complete volume of moral philosophy for which he has sought in vain in all libraries. On the left horizon, are the green mountains of Vermont; and at the right extremity sparkles the Atlantic. Beneath lies the forest where the deer are hiding, and the birds rejoicing in song. Beyond the river, he sees spread the rich plains of Connecticut; there, where a blue expanse lies beyond the triple range of hills, are the churches of religious Massachusetts sending up their sabbath-psalms—praise which he is too high to hear, while God is not. The fields and waters seem to him to-day no more truly property than the skies which shine down upon them; and to think how some below are busying their thoughts this Sabbath-day about how they shall hedge in another field, or multiply their flocks on yonder meadows, gives him a taste of the same pity which Jesus felt in his solitude, when his followers were contending about which should be greatest. It seems strange to him now that man should call any thing his but the power which is in him, and which can create somewhat more vast and beautiful than all that this horizon encloses. Here he gains the conviction, to be never again shaken, that all that is real is ideal; that the joys and sorrows of men do not spring up out of the ground, or fly abroad on the wings of the wind, or come showered down from the sky ; that good cannot be hedged in, nor evil barred out; even that light does not reach the spirit through the eye alone, nor wisdom through the medium of sound or silence only. He becomes of one mind with the spiritual Berkeley, that the face of nature itself, the very picture of woods, and streams, and meadows, is a hieroglyphic writing in the spirit itself, of which the retina is no interpreter. The proof is just below him, (at least, it came under my eye,) in the lady (not American) who, after glancing over the landscape, brings her chair into the piazza, and turning her back to the champaign, and her face to the wooden walls of the hotel, begins the study, this Sunday morning, of her lap-full of news­papers. What a sermon is thus preached to him at this moment from a very hackneyed text! To him that hath much—that hath the eye, and ear, and wealth, of the spirit, shall more be given—even a replenishing of this spiritual life from that which, to others, is formless and dumb ; while, from him that hath little, who trusts in that which lies about him rather than in that which lives within him, shall be taken away, by natural decline, the power of perceiving and enjoying what is within his own domain. To him who is already enriched with large divine and human revelations, this scene is, for all its stillness, musical with divine and human speech; while one who has been deafened by the din of worldly affairs can hear nothing in this mountain solitude,"