"A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson"--a poem written in Beacon in 1827 by William Cullen Bryant.

Ages ago as a student in Beacon High School, I  had to read the poem "Thanatopsis" by poet William Cullen Bryant. How much more palatable that homework assignment would have been for my English class had we known that Bryant, a recognized giant in nineteenth-century American literature, once walked the streets of Beacon and even had written one of his poems here in Fishkill Landing!

Bryant (1794-1878) was a frequent sojourner in our community, spending several summers in a boarding house here while visiting his wealthy friends William Verplanck, John Peter DeWindt, and Henry Sargent. It was as a guest at Sargent's estate "Wodenethe" that Bryant fell victim to one of Henry Sargent's favorite practical jokes involving linear perspective, in which Sargent had his young son Winthrop stand off in the distance, fishing pole in hand, and appear to be casting into the Hudson River when the boy actually was standing near the Sargent home.

Bryant thus was well acquainted with the Beacon area, when, in 1827, while waiting for the ferry at Fishkill Landing, he wrote the poem, "A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson." Bryant also was friends with Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole and Asher Durand. Later, in 1859, Durand transposed Bryant's ferry poem into painting, but changed the setting from Beacon to Cold Spring.

Your assignment, therefore, is to read the poem "A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson." Its first of four stanzas begins this way:

Cool Shades and dews are round my way,

And silence of the early day;

Mid the dark rocks that watch his bed,

Glitters the mighty Hudson spread,

Unrippled, save the drops that fall

From the shrubs that fringe his mountain wall;

And o'er the clear still water swells

The music of the Sabbath bells.