LITEKATURE ON STATEN ISLAND. 5 



in leveling forests and settling a wild continent cannot stop to sing 

 songs and write stories. 



We will not test the soundness of the theory. At least, we please 

 ourselves by saying that instead of writing great poems we build great 

 railroads and that the genius which elsewhere turns to literature here 

 turns to industry and enterprise. We might say, indeed, that Chaucer 

 was the child of a young country, that Shakespeare even upon an 

 Illinois prairie would have warbled his native wood notes wild, and that 

 Irving turned from business to literature. Doubtless, however, circum- 

 stance, tendency and natural selection are powerful influences in quick- 

 ening the literary impulse by determining the mental inclination. But 

 the mysterious power of genius is still superior to circumstance, and 

 Burns born in the extremest poverty, of a long line of struggling 

 farmers, as he toils along the furrow, breaks into immortal song. 



But if the Island has not produced much that belongs to literature, 

 it has the satisfaction of knowing that it is not destitute of what may 

 be called the circumstance of literature. Its landscape is beautiful 

 and suggestive, its neighborhood is historic. Its wooded hills, soft 

 with verdure, slope eastward to the narrows, through which glides an 

 endless fleet of various sea craft; or to wide silent meadows that fill 

 the west where the narrow Kill, a winding line of light, threads the 

 land of Beulah; or toAvard the busy, humming, peopled north and 

 northwest, toward marts and factories and rattling steam roads, 

 toward the great city and the broad Hudson, or southward they look 

 upon the lower bay, and far beyond, the airy highlands of the Jersey 

 shore undulating seaward and sinking to the long line of Sandy Hook 

 blending with the ocean. 



Upon these waters the shadowy Verrazauo may have floated when 

 the Cabots first saw New England, and before the Pilgrims landed at 

 Plymouth Hendrik Hudson's crew penetrated the Kill van Kull. His 

 river yonder was the prize of the old contest of France and England 

 for the continent and the command of it was the object of the military 

 strategy of the revolution. Along these waters passed the English 

 and the Dutch fleete that took and retook New Netherland. There 

 lay the fleet of Lord Howe and upon the Island hills and fields the 

 camp of his brother's army. From our shores crossed the host of 

 scarlet and gold to Long Island and pushed Washington back to the city 

 and over the Hudson to the far blue hills of Morristown in the north- 



