Farewell to thee, fair lake! Long may it be before thy
rugged hills be stripped of their green garniture, or thy bright waters
marred by the unpicturesque improvements of man's avarice!--for truly
thou, in this utilitarian age, and at brief distance from America's
metropolis, art young, and innocent, and unpolluted, as when the red man
drank of thy pure waters, long centuries ere he dreamed of the
pale-faced oppressors, who have already rooted out his race from half
its native continent.* [*Marred it has been long ago. A huge dam has
been drawn across its outlet, in order to supply a feeder to the Morris
Canal--a gigantic piece of unprofitable improvement, made, I believe,
merely as a basis on which for brokers, stock-jobbers--et id genus omne
of men too utilitarian and ambitious to be content with earning money
honestly--to exercise their prodigious 'cuteness. The effect of this has
been to change the bold shores into pestilential submerged swamps,
whereon the dead trees still stand, tall, gray and ghostly; to convert a
number of acres of beautiful meadow-land into stagnant grassy shallows;
to back up the waters at the lake's head, to the utter destruction of
several fine farms; and, last not least, to create fever and ague in
abundance, where no such thing had ever been heard tell of before.
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