The Palisades

On the west side of the Hudson River, there is a cliff, or crag of rock, all carved into queer shapes. It stretches along the riverside for twenty or thirty miles, as far as Tarrytown, or further, to the broad part where the stream looks like a sea. The cliff rises up, as a rule very boldly, to the height of several hundred feet. The top of it (the Jersey shore) appears regular. It is like a well-laid wall along the river, with trees and one or two white wooden…

Where the Palisades are the grandest is just as high up as Yonkers. Hereabouts they are very stately, for they are all marshaled along a river a mile or more broad, which runs in a straight-line past them, with a great tide. If you take a boat and row across to the Palisades, their beauty makes you shiver. In the afternoon, when you are underneath them, the sun is shut away from you; and there you are, in the chill and the gloom, with the great cliff towering up and…