43 



streets and her farms covered with the happy homes of the 

 multitudes of her population. With the great New York harbor 

 lapping her shores, where the argosies of all the world might 

 find safe anchor and sail thence unimpeded to all the seven 

 seas; with unsurpassed opportunities for wharves and docks at 

 deep water; with all the trunk line railroads but one terminat- 

 ing at her front; with the heights of Bergen Hill, an ideal place 

 for residences; with vast reaches of level land for factories; 

 nature laid out her plans for a great community that no architect 

 could surpass. 



And such vistas ! On the south, the storied hills of Staten 

 Island, full of revolutionary reminiscence; to the south and 

 west the historic shores of Elizabeth, where the first governor 

 held his court ; to the east, from every vantage point, you behold 

 the great harbor with its busy sailings to and fro, and from 

 the Palisades you look down upon the greatest city in the 

 western world, its pinnacles and minarets gleaming in the clear 

 blue like some dream city of the ''Arabian Nights" ; and look- 

 ing north you behold the great geologic wonder of the Palisades, 

 whose stately battlements and pillars march forward in majestic 

 splendor, mirrored in the lordly Hudson, whose marvellous 

 beauty is not excelled by the storied Rhine ; and on the west — 

 Ah ! Those of us who have stood on the western brow of 

 Bergen Hill at the close of a September day and watched the 

 sun sink below the azure wall of the Orange Mountains, and 

 have seen the Master Artist turn their peaks and outlines into 

 emerald and silver, rose and purple, while the broad expanse 

 of meadows under the last declining rays turns to massy gold; 

 and as the vagrant breeze sweeps over their tops they seem, to 

 run in a stream, of molten splendor to meet the Hackensack, 

 gleaming like a ribbon of polished silver in their loving embrace, 

 while the rolling shadows of the dusk turn the mountains into 

 exquisite lavender and misty gray — have seen a vista of sur- 

 passing beauty. 



Now into this Eden of ours, to hold up and delay its manifest 

 destiny, to stay the quadrupling of its population, and the quin- 



