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THE CATSKILL MOUNTAINS.

BY WASHINGTON IRVING.

THE Catskill, Katskill, or Cat River Mountains derived their name, in the time of the Dutch domination, from the Catamounts by which they were infested; and which, with the bear, the wolf, and the deer, are still to be found in some of their most difficult recesses. The interior of these mountains is in the highest degree wild and romantic; here are rocky precipices mantled with primeval forests; deep gorges walled in by beetling cliffs, with torrents tumbling as it were from the sky; and savage glens rarely trodden excepting by the hunter. With all this internal rudeness, the aspect of these mountains toward the Hudson at times is eminently bland and beautiful, sloping down into a country softened by cultivation, and bearing much of the rich character of Italian scenery about the skirts of the Apennines.

The Catskills form an advanced post, or lateral spur of the great Alleganian or Appalachian system of mountains which sweeps through the interior of our continent, from Southwest to Northeast, from Alabama to the extremity of Maine, for nearly fourteen hundred miles, belting the whole of our original confederacy, and rivalling our

great system of lakes in extent and grandeur. Its vast ramifications comprise a number of parallel chains and lateral groups; such as the Cumberland Mountains, the Blue Ridge, the Alleganies, the Delaware and Lehigh, the Highlands of the Hudson, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In many of these vast ranges or sierras, nature still reigns in indomitable wildness: their rocky ridges, their rugged clefts and defiles, teem with magnificent vegetation. Here are locked up mighty forests that have never been invaded by the axe; deep umbrageous valleys where the virgin soil has never been outraged by the plough; bright streams flowing in untasked idleness, unburthened by commerce, unchecked by the mill-dam. This mountain zone is in fact the great poetical region of our country; resisting, like the tribes which once inhabited it, the taming hand of cultivation; and maintaining a hallowed ground for fancy and the muses. It is a magnificent and all-pervading feature, that might have given our country a name, and a poetical one, had not the all-controlling powers of common-place determined otherwise.

The Catskill Mountains, as I have observed, maintain all the internal wildness of the labyrinth of mountains with which they are connected. Their detached position, overlooking a wide lowland region, with the majestic Hudson rolling through it, has given them a distinct character, and rendered them at all times a rallying point for romance and fable. Much of the fanciful associations with which they have been clothed may be owing to their being peculiarly subject to those beautiful atmospherical effects which constitute one of the great charms of Hudson River scenery. To me they have ever been the fairy region of the Hudson. I speak, however, from early impressions; made in the happy days of boyhood; when all the world had a tinge of fairy land. I shall never forget my first view of these mountains. It was in the course of a voyage up the Hudson in the

good old times before steamboats and railroads had driven all poetry and romance out of travel. A voyage up the Hudson in those days, was equal to a voyage to Europe at present, and cost almost as much time: but we enjoyed the river then; we relished it as we did our wine, sip by sip, not, as at present, gulping all down at a draught without tasting it. My whole voyage up the Hudson was full of wonder and romance. I was a lively boy, somewhat imaginative, of easy faith, and prone to relish every thing which partook of the marvellous. Among the passengers on board of the sloop was a veteran Indian trader, on his way to the lakes to traffic with the natives. He had discovered my propensity, and amused himself throughout the voyage by telling me Indian legends and grotesque stories about every noted place on the river, such as Spuyten Devil Creek, the Tappan Sea, the Devil's DansKammer, and other hobgoblin places. The Catskill Mountains especially called forth a host of fanciful traditions. We were all day slowly tiding along in sight of them, so that he had full time to weave his whimsical narratives. In these mountains he told me, according to Indian belief, was kept the great treasury of storm and sunshine, for the region of the Hudson. An old squaw spirit had charge of it, who dwelt on the highest peak of the mountain. Here she kept Day and Night shut up in her wigwam, letting out only one of them at a time. She made new moons every month, and hung them up in the sky, cutting up the old ones into stars. The great Manitou, or master spirit, employed her to manufacture clouds; sometimes she wove them out of cobwebs, gossamers, and morning dew, and sent them off flake after flake, to float in the air and give light summer showers-sometimes she would brew up black thunder-storms, and send down drenching rains; to swell the streams and sweep every thing away. He had many stories, also, about mischievous spirits who infested the mountains in the shape of animals, and played all kinds of pranks upon Indian

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