"Possessing, for the most part, a width of eight or ten miles, this
chain of hills consists, at some points, of a single ridge, rude,
forest-clad and lonely--at others, of two, three, or even four distinct
and separate lines of heights, with valleys more or less highly
cultured, long sheets of most translucent water, and wild mountain
streams dividing them.
"With these hills--known as the Highlands--where the gigantic Hudson has
cloven, at some distant day, a devious path for his eternal and
resistless waters, and by a hundred other names, the Warwick Hills, the
Greenwoods, and yet farther west, the Blue Ridge and the Kittatinny
Mountains, as they trend southerly and west across New York and New
Jersey--with these hills I have now to do.
"Not as the temples meet for the lonely muse, fit habitations for the
poet's rich imaginings! not as they are most glorious in their natural
scenery--whether the youthful May is covering their rugged brows with
the bright tender verdure of the tasseled larch, and the yet brighter
green of maple, mountain ash and willow--or the full flush of summer has
clothed their forests with impervious and shadowy foliage, while
carpeting their sides with the unnumbered blossoms of calmia,
rhododendron and azalea!--whether the gorgeous hues of autumn gleam
like the banners of ten thousand victor armies along their rugged
slopes, or the frozen winds of winter have roofed their headlands with
inviolate white snow! Not as their bowels teem with the wealth of mines
which ages of man's avarice may vainly labor to exhaust! but as they are
the loved abode of many a woodland denizen that has retreated, even from
more remote and seemingly far wilder fastnesses, to these sequestered
haunts.
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