[Illustration: The Study, Riverby. From a photograph
by Charles S. Olcott]
During his excursions in the vicinity of West Park, Mr. Burroughs
had lingered oftenest in the hills back of, and parallel with,
the Hudson, and here he finally chose the site for his rustic
cabin. He had fished and rowed in Black Pond, sat by its falls
in the primitive forest, sometimes with a book, sometimes with
his son, or with some other hunter or fisher of congenial tastes;
and on one memorable day in April, years agone, he had tarried
there with Walt Whitman. There, seated on a fallen tree, Whitman
wrote this description of the place which was later printed in
"Specimen Days":--
I jot this memorandum in a wild scene of woods and hills where
we have come to visit a waterfall. I never saw finer or more
copious hemlocks, many of them large, some old and hoary. Such
a sentiment to them, secretive, shaggy, what I call weather-beaten,
and let-alone--a rich underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses,
beginning to be spotted with the early summer wild flowers.
Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid gurgle from the hoarse,
impetuous, copious fall--the greenish-tawny, darkly transparent
waters plunging with velocity down the rocks, with patches of
milk-white foam--a stream of hurrying amber, thirty feet wide,
risen far back in the hills and woods, now rushing with volume--every
hundred rods a fall, and sometimes three or four in that distance.
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