r 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":

"Rivers are as various in their forms as forest trees. The Mississippi
is like an oak with enormous branches. What a branch is the Red River,
the Arkansas, the Ohio, the Missouri! The Hudson is like the pine
or poplar--mainly trunk. From New York to Albany there is only an
inconsiderable limb or two, and but few gnarls and excrescences. Cut
off the Rondout, the Esopus, the C