Home / Bacon, Edgar Mayhew. The Hudson River from Ocean to Source: Historical, Legendary, Picturesque. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1903. / Passage

The Hudson River from Ocean to Source (Bacon, 1903)

Bacon, Edgar Mayhew. The Hudson River from Ocean to Source: Historical, Legendary, Picturesque. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1903. 301 words

At his place, which he named Coldenham, he spent the delightful leisure years of a life that had known, and was destined to know, many activities. There he collected, cultivated, and classified plants, assisted by his daughter, of whom Peter Collinson wrote to Linuceus that she was "perhaps the first lady who has so perfectly studied your system. She deserves to be celebrated." Cadwallader Colden, whose full name was afterwards shared by his no less famous grandson, was a successful physician of Philadelphia from 1708 to 1718, when

Literary Associations of the Hudson 277

he remo\-ed to Xew York. After filHng several piibhc offices, among them that of Sur\'eyor-General, he was appointed Lieutenant-Governor in 1761, and, as the poHtical Hves of his immediate su|_)eriors were usually brief, he became, by virtue of his experience and great ability, practically the chief executive of the State for fifteen years. He was the author of several books, the most important one being a History of the Five Nations of Cajiada. He did not survive the Revolution, his death occurring a short time after the battle of Harlem Heights. He died in Long Island at the age of seventy-eight years. A century later, another celel)rity among nature students lived near the shore of the river, not many miles from Coldenham. Many an elderly man will remember with pleasure and no small degree of gratitude America's first landscape-gardener, -- first in eminence ifnot in time, -- Andrew Jackson Downing. He had two qualities that are not always combined in one individual, namely, artistic sensibility and practical sense. The latter enabled him to make the former effective. Before his day we are led to believe that in the laying out of rural estates, grotesque and chaotic arrangement of natural material was the rule rather than the exception.