Church at Rhinebeck. He will be remembered as a scholarly man of sweet, rare character. His contributions to Christian hymnology possibly constitute his chief claim to remembrance, though he devoted nearly twenty years of his life to public speaking and writing. While James K. Polk was President, Doctor Bethune was offered the ap- pointment to the chair of Moral Philosophy at West Point, which he felt obliged to decline, as he also did the chancellorship of New York University, to which he was chosen as the successor of Mr. Frelinghuysen. He lived just long enough to make a stirring address at the great Union meeting, held in New York on the 20th of April, 1861, departing soon after that to Italy, where he died. The name of Alfred B. Street belongs to the Hud- son. He was born at Poughkeepsie, passed many years of his life in Albany, was descended from an old Digitized by Microsoft® Literary Associations of the Hudson 279 Hudson River family, — the Livingstons, — and did not neglect to celebrate with his pen the wilder beauties of his native region. Street's poems, particularly those dealing with the sterner aspects of nature, gave him an early rank among the best American poets. In his day, among both poets and painters, there was a painstaking fashion of presenting minutias. Breadth of effect was apt to be sacrificed to delicacy of detail. He wrote as artists of his day painted; every leaf on every last twig was described with conscientious care. His almost passionate love for nature was retained through the cares and activities of professional life, and the influence of the wild, rugged scenery amidst which several years of his boyhood were passed never deserted him. He loved to sing of " sweet forest odours" that Have their birth From the clothed boughs and teeming earth; Where pine-cones dropp'd, leaves piled and dead, Long tufts of grass, and stars of fern, With many a wild flower's fairy urn, A thick, elastic carpet spread; Here, with its mossy pall, the trunk, Resolving into soil, is sunk; There, wrench'd but lately from its throne. By some fierce whirlwind circling past. Its huge roots mass'd with earth and stone. One of the woodland kings is cast. Street wrote many biographies and descriptive works. The Indian Pass, already referred to, and Digitized by Microsoft® 28o The Hudson River Pictures in the Adirondacks were published in 1 869. He was for many years State Librarian, dying in 1881. Among all the writers to whom our pen has pointed (veering madly as a weathercock on a March day or a needle amidst a hundred electric points), none has a stronger claim to Hudson River celebrity than Susan and Anna B. Warner. While others have lived upon one bank or the other of the river, they have spent their lives almost in the midst of it, on an island in the very wonderland of the Highlands. Henry Warner, a member of the New York bar, removed to Constitution Island with his family before the middle of the nineteenth century. An old house, occupied as headquarters during the Revolution, was added to and partly rebuilt by him, and is still the residence of his surviving daughter, Miss Anna B. Warner. Susan Warner, to quote the words of Evert Duyck- inck, "made a sudden step into eminence as a writer, by the publication, in 1849, of ^^^ Wide, Wide World, a novel in two volumes. It is a story of American domestic life, written in an easy and somewhat diffuse style." The Wide, Wide World was soon followed by Queechy, and this by a theological work called The Law and the Testimony. Her earlier writings were published over the pen name of Elizabeth Wetherell. Duyckinck did not tell the half when he said that Miss Warner made a sudden step into eminence by the pub- lication of her first novel. During the first ten years Digitized by Microsoft® Literary Associations of the Hudson 281 over one hundred thousand copies were sold of the American edition, a record which, bearing in mind the limited public of the day, was noteworthy, and it has remained in steady demand during the half century since its first issue. Some hundreds of thousands of copies were sold in European editions, which brought to the writer fame, if not wealth. The sisters frequently worked together. The younger, who had chosen Amy Lathrop as her lit- erary title, made her bow to the reading public with a novel called Dollars and Cents; but she was asso- ciated with the elder Miss Warner in the production of The Hills of the Shatemuc, the title being one of the Indian names for the Hudson River. Some of the most successful and delightful of Miss Anna