The Hudson River joins the harbour. And then the harbour joins the sea. Always the rivers run.

The Hudson River drinks from out the inland slowly; it is like vats that well with purple and rich wine. The Hudson River is like purple depths of evening; it is like the flames of colour on the Palisades, elves’ echoes and old Dutch and Hallowe’en. It is like the Phantom Horseman, the tossed boughs, and the demented winds, and it is like the headed cider and great fires of the Dutchmen in the winter time.

The Hudson River is like old October and tawny Indians in their camping places long ago; it is like long pipes and old tobacco; it is like cool depths and opulence; it is like the shimmer of liquid green on summer days.

The Hudson River takes the thunder of fast trains and throws a handful of lost echoes at the hills. It is like the calls of lost men in the mountains; and it is like the country boy who is coming to the city with a feeling of glory in him. It is like the green plush smell of the Pullman cars and snowy linen; it is like the kid in upper four and the good-looking woman down below who stirs her legs slowly in starched sheets: it is the magic river. It is like coming to the city to make money, to find glory, fame and love, and a life more fortunate and happy than any we have ever known. It is like the Knickerbockers and early autumn; it is like the Rich Folks, and the River People, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Roosevelts; it is like Robert W. Chambers and the Society Folks; it is like the younger set and Hilary, and Monica, and Garth; it is like The Story Thus Far:

The lovely Monica Delavere the beautiful but spoiled daughter of one of the richest men in the world meets at a party given at her father’s Mount Kisco estate in honour of her approaching marriage to a young architect Hilary Chedester his friend Garth Montgomery a young artist just returned from years of study abroad fascinated yet repelled by his dark passionate face and his slender hands with the longer tapering fingers of the artist and goaded by something enigmatic and mocking in his eyes in a moment of mad recklessness spurred on by a twinge of jealousy at the undue attention which she thinks Hilary is bestowing on Rita Daventry an old flame she accepts a challenge from Garth to go for a mad dash across the night in his speedster their objective being his hunting lodge in the hills and a return before dawn arrived at the lodge however Garth coolly announces that his car is out of petrol and that he must phone for assistance to the nearest town somewhat disturbed and reflecting for the first time now on the possible scandal her reckless exploit may cause she enters the lodge now go on with the story:

“Monica’s red lips curved in a smile of mocking reproof. She made a moue.

“‘Hardly a place I should have chosen to spend the evening, my dear man,’ she said. ‘But then, perhaps it is the latest Paris fashion to take ladies to deserted places and inform them you are stranded. C’est comme ?a à Paris, hein?’”

Yes, all these things were like the Hudson River.

And above all else, the Hudson River was like the light — oh, more than anything it was the light, the light, the tone, the texture of the magic light in which he had seen the city as a child, that made the Hudson River wonderful.

The light was golden, deep and full with all rich golden lights of harvest; the light was golden like the flesh of women, lavish as their limbs, true, depthless, tender as their glorious eyes, fine-spun and maddening as their hair, as unutterable with desire as their fragrant nests of spicery, their deep melon-heavy breasts. The light was golden like a golden morning light that shines through ancient glass into a room of old dark brown. The light was brown, dark lavish brown hued with rich lights of gold; the light was rich brown shot with gold like the sultry and exultant fragrance of ground coffee; the light was lavish brown like old stone houses gulched in morning on a city street, brown like exultant breakfast smells that come from basement areas in the brownstone houses where the rich men lived; the light was blue, steep frontal blue, like morning underneath the frontal cliff of buildings, the light was vertical cool blue, hazed with thin morning mist, the light was blue, cold flowing harbour blue of clean cool waters rimed brightly with a dancing morning gold, fresh, half-rotten with the musty river stench, blue with the blue-black of the morning gulch and canyon of the city, blue-black with cool morning shadow as the ferry packed with its thousand small white staring faces turned one way, drove bluntly toward the rusty weathered slips.

The light was amber-brown in vast dark chambers shuttered from young light where in great walnut beds the glorious women stirred in sensual warmth their lavish limbs. The light was brown-gold like ground coffee, merchants and the walnut houses where they lived, brown-gold like old brick buildings grimed with money and the smell of trade, brown-gold like morning in great gleaming bars of swart mahogany, the fresh wet beer-wash, lemon-rind and the smell of angostura bitters. Then full golden in the evening in the theatres, shining with full golden warmth and body on full golden figures of the women, on fat, red plush, and on rich, faded, slightly stale smell, and on the gilt sheaves and cupids and the cornucopias, on the fleshly, potent softly-golden smell of all the people; and in great restaurants the light was brighter gold, but full and round like warm onyx columns, smooth warmly tinted marble, old wine in dark rounded age-encrusted bottles, and the great blond figures of naked women on rose-clouded ceilings. Then the light was full and rich, brown-golden like great fields in autumn; it was full swelling golden light like mown fields, bronze-red picketed with fat rusty golden sheaves of corn, and governed by huge barns of red and the mellow winy fragrance of the apples. — Yes............