a great arm of the sea, a mile or two in breadth, extended east of north,
and thither, the mariner dreamed, might lie the long-sought pathway to the
Indies. A tongue of land, broadening as it receded, and swelling in low
undulations, divided this wide strait from a narrower one more to the
east. All was forest; and eastward still was more forest, stretching
seaward. Southward, the land was low--almost as low and flat as the
Netherlands themselves; an unexplored immensity, whose fertile soil had
for countless ages been hidden from the sun by the impervious shelter of
interlacing boughs. No--never had Hudson seen a land of such enduring
charm and measureless promise as this: and here, in this citadel of
loneliness, which no white man's foot had ever trod, which, till then,
only the eyes of the corsair Verrazano had seen, near a century before
--here was to arise, like Aladdin's Palace, the metropolis of the western
world; enormous, roaring, hurrying, trafficking, grasping, swarming with
its millions upon millions of striving, sleepless, dauntless, exulting,
despairing, aspiring human souls; the home of unbridled luxury, of abysmal
poverty, of gigantic industries, of insolent idleness, of genius, of
learning, of happiness and of misery; of far-reaching enterprise, of
political glory and shame, of science and art; here human life was to
reach its intensest, most breathless, relentless and insatiable
expression; here was to stand a city whose arms should reach westward over
a continent, and eastward round the world; here were to thunder the
streets and tower the buildings and reek the chimneys and arch the bridges
and rumble the railways and throb the electric wires of American New York,
the supreme product of Nineteenth Century civilization, radiant with the
virtues and grimy with the failings that mankind has up to this time
developed.

On the 23d of June, two years later, Henry Hudson was the central figure
in another scene. He sat in a small, open boat, hoary with frozen spray;