The Hudson River drinks from out the inland slowly; it is like vats1 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 Phantom2 Horseman, the tossed boughs4, 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 tawny5 Indians in their camping places long ago; it is like long pipes and old tobacco; it is like cool depths and opulence6; it is like the shimmer7 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 linen8; it is like the kid in upper four and the good-looking woman down below who stirs her legs slowly in starched9 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. Chambers10 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 repelled11 by his dark passionate12 face and his slender hands with the longer tapering13 fingers of the artist and goaded14 by something enigmatic and mocking in his eyes in a moment of mad recklessness spurred on by a twinge of jealousy15 at the undue16 attention which she thinks Hilary is bestowing17 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 lodge18 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 reproof19. 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 deserted20 places and inform them you are stranded21. 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 texture22 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, lavish23 as their limbs, true, depthless, tender as their glorious eyes, fine-spun and maddening as their hair, as unutterable with desire as their fragrant24 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 hued25 with rich lights of gold; the light was rich brown shot with gold like the sultry and exultant26 fragrance27 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 underneath29 the frontal cliff of buildings, the light was vertical30 cool blue, hazed31 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 gulch28 and canyon32 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 rusty33 weathered slips.
The light was amber-brown in vast dark chambers shuttered from young light where in great walnut35 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 gilt36 sheaves and cupids and the cornucopias37, on the fleshly, potent38 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 tinted39 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 swelling40 golden light like mown fields, bronze-red picketed41 with fat rusty golden sheaves of corn, and governed by huge barns of red and the mellow42 winy fragrance of the apples. — Yes, all of this had been the tone and texture of the lights that qualified43 his vision of the city and the river when he was a child.
Proud, cruel, ever-changing and ephemeral city, to whom we came once when our hearts were high, our blood passionate and hot, our brain a particle of fire: infinite and mutable city, mercurial44 city, strange citadel45 of million-visaged time — Oh! endless river and eternal rock, in which the forms of life came, passed and changed intolerably before us, and to which we came, as every youth has come, with such enormous madness, and with so mad a hope — for what?
To eat you, branch and root and tree; to devour46 you, golden fruit of power and love and happiness; to consume you to your sources, river and spire47 and rock, down to your iron roots; to entomb within our flesh for ever the huge substance of your billion-footed pavements, the intolerable web and memory of dark million-visaged time.
And what is left now of all our madness, hunger, and desire? What have you given, incredible mirage48 of all our million shining hopes, to those who wanted to possess you wholly to your ultimate designs, your final sources, from whom you took the strength, the passion, and the innocence49 of youth?
What have we taken from you, protean50 and phantasmal shape of time? What have we remembered of your million images, of your billion weavings out of accident and number, of the mindless fury of your dateless days, the brutal51 stupefaction of your thousand streets and pavements? What have we seen and known that is ours for ever?
Gigantic city, we have taken nothing — not even a handful of your trampled52 dust — we have made no image on your iron breast and left not even the print of a heel upon your stony53-hearted pavements. The possession of all things, even the air we breathed, was held from us, and the river of life and time flowed through the grasp of our hands for ever, and we held nothing for our hunger and desire except the proud and trembling moments, one by one. Over the trodden and forgotten words, the rust34 and dusty burials of yesterday, we were born again into a thousand lives and deaths, and we were left for ever with only the substance of our waning54 flesh, and the hauntings of an accidental memory, with all its various freight of great and little things which passed and vanished instantly and could never be forgotten, and of those unbidden and unfathomed wisps and fumes55 of memory that share the mind with all the proud dark images of love and death.
The tugging56 of a leaf upon a bough3 in late October, a skirl of blown papers in the street, a cloud that came and went and made its shadow in the lights of April. And the forgotten laughter of lost people in dark streets, a face that passed us in another train, the house our mistress lived in as a child, a whipping of flame at a slum’s cold corner, the corded veins57 on an old man’s hand, the feathery green of a tree, a daybreak in a city street in the month of May, a voice that cried out sharply and was silent in the night, and a song that a woman sang, a word that she spoke58 at dusk before she went away — the memory of a ruined wall, the ancient empty visage of a half-demolished house in which love lay, the mark of a young man’s fist in crumbling59 plaster, a lost relic60, brief and temporal, in all the everlasting61 variousness of your life, as the madness, pain and anguish62 in the heart that caused it — these are all that we have taken from you, iron-breasted city, and they are ours and gone for ever from us, even as things are lost and broken in the wind, and as the ghosts of time are lost, and as the everlasting river that flowed past us in darkness to the sea.
The river is a tide of moving waters: by night it floods the pockets of the earth. By night it drinks strange time, dark time. By night the river drinks proud potent tides of strange dark time. By night the river drains the tides, proud potent tides of time’s dark waters that, with champ and lift of teeth, with lapse63 and reluctation of their breath, fill with a kissing glut64 the pockets of the earth. Sired by the horses of the sea, maned with the dark, they come.
They come! Ships call! The hooves of night, the horses of the sea, come on below their manes of darkness. And for ever the river runs. Deep as the tides of time and memory, deep as the tides of sleep, the river runs.
And there are ships there! Have we not heard the ships there? (Have we not heard the great ships going down the river? Have we not heard the great ships putting out to sea?)
Great whistles blow there. Have we not heard the whistles blow there? Have we not heard the whistles blowing in the river? (A harness of bright ships is on the water. A thunder of faint hooves is on the land.)
And there is time there. (Have we not heard strange time, dark time, strange tragic65 time there? Have we not heard dark time, strange time, the dark, the moving tide of time as it flows down the river?)
And in the night-time, in the dark there, in all the sleeping silence of the earth have we not heard the river, the rich immortal66 river, full of its strange dark time?
Full with the pulse of time it flows there, full with the pulse of all men living, sleeping, dying, waking, it will flow there, full with the billion dark and secret moments of our lives it flows there. Filled with all the hope, the madness and the passion of our youth it flows there, in the daytime, in the dark, drinking with ceaseless glut the land, mining into its tides the earth as it mines the hours and moments of our life into its tides, moving against the sides of ships, foaming67 about piled crustings of old wharves68, sliding like time and silence by the vast cliff of the city, girdling the stony isle69 of life with moving waters — thick with the wastes of earth, dark with our stains, and heavied with our dumpings, rich, rank, beautiful, and unending as all life, all living, as it flows by us, by us, by us, to the sea!
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1
vats
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| varieties 变化，多样性，种类 | |
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phantom
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| n.幻影，虚位，幽灵；adj.错觉的，幻影的，幽灵的 | |
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bough
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| n.大树枝，主枝 | |
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boughs
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| 大树枝( bough的名词复数 ) | |
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tawny
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| adj.茶色的，黄褐色的；n.黄褐色 | |
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opulence
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| n.财富，富裕 | |
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shimmer
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| v./n.发微光，发闪光；微光 | |
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linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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9
starched
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| adj.浆硬的，硬挺的，拘泥刻板的v.把（衣服、床单等）浆一浆( starch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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chambers
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| n.房间( chamber的名词复数 )；（议会的）议院；卧室；会议厅 | |
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repelled
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| v.击退( repel的过去式和过去分词 )；使厌恶；排斥；推开 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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tapering
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| adj.尖端细的 | |
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goaded
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| v.刺激( goad的过去式和过去分词 )；激励；（用尖棒）驱赶；驱使（或怂恿、刺激）某人 | |
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jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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undue
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| adj.过分的；不适当的；未到期的 | |
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bestowing
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| 砖窑中砖堆上层已烧透的砖 | |
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lodge
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| v.临时住宿，寄宿，寄存，容纳；n.传达室，小旅馆 | |
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reproof
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| n.斥责，责备 | |
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deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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stranded
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| a.搁浅的，进退两难的 | |
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texture
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| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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lavish
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| adj.无节制的；浪费的；vt.慷慨地给予，挥霍 | |
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fragrant
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| adj.芬香的，馥郁的，愉快的 | |
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hued
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| 有某种色调的 | |
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exultant
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| adj.欢腾的，狂欢的，大喜的 | |
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fragrance
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| n.芬芳，香味，香气 | |
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gulch
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| n.深谷，峡谷 | |
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underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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vertical
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| adj.垂直的，顶点的，纵向的；n.垂直物，垂直的位置 | |
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hazed
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| v.（使）笼罩在薄雾中( haze的过去式和过去分词 )；戏弄，欺凌（新生等，有时作为加入美国大学生联谊会的条件） | |
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canyon
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| n.峡谷，溪谷 | |
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rusty
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| adj.生锈的；锈色的；荒废了的 | |
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rust
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| n.锈；v.生锈；(脑子)衰退 | |
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walnut
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| n.胡桃，胡桃木，胡桃色，茶色 | |
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gilt
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| adj.镀金的；n.金边证券 | |
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cornucopias
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| n.丰饶角（象征丰饶的羊角，角内呈现满溢的鲜花、水果等）( cornucopia的名词复数 ) | |
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potent
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| adj.强有力的，有权势的；有效力的 | |
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tinted
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| adj. 带色彩的 动词tint的过去式和过去分词 | |
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swelling
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| n.肿胀 | |
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picketed
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| 用尖桩围住（picket的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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mellow
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| adj.柔和的；熟透的；v.变柔和；(使)成熟 | |
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qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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mercurial
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| adj.善变的，活泼的 | |
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citadel
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| n.城堡；堡垒；避难所 | |
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devour
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| v.吞没；贪婪地注视或谛听，贪读；使着迷 | |
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spire
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| n.(教堂)尖顶，尖塔，高点 | |
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mirage
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| n.海市蜃楼，幻景 | |
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innocence
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| n.无罪；天真；无害 | |
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50
protean
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| adj.反复无常的；变化自如的 | |
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brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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52
trampled
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| 踩( trample的过去式和过去分词 )； 践踏； 无视； 侵犯 | |
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53
stony
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| adj.石头的，多石头的，冷酷的，无情的 | |
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waning
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| adj.（月亮）渐亏的，逐渐减弱或变小的n.月亏v.衰落( wane的现在分词 )；（月）亏；变小；变暗淡 | |
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55
fumes
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| n.(强烈而刺激的)气味，气体 | |
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56
tugging
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| n.牵引感v.用力拉，使劲拉，猛扯( tug的现在分词 ) | |
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veins
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| n.纹理；矿脉( vein的名词复数 )；静脉；叶脉；纹理 | |
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58
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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crumbling
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| adj.摇摇欲坠的 | |
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relic
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| n.神圣的遗物，遗迹，纪念物 | |
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everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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anguish
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| n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦，烦恼 | |
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lapse
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| n.过失，流逝，失效，抛弃信仰，间隔；vi.堕落，停止，失效，流逝；vt.使失效 | |
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glut
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| n.存货过多，供过于求；v.狼吞虎咽 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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foaming
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| adj.布满泡沫的；发泡 | |
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wharves
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| n.码头，停泊处( wharf的名词复数 ) | |
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isle
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| n.小岛，岛 | |
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