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NEW-YORK, JUNE, 1835.

FORT PUTNAM.

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Immediately beneath is seen the plain of West Point, surrounded by the buildings of the national Military Academy, and gay with the tents of the encamped cadets, or glittering with their arms and martial array.

scenery, as wild and as rude now as when old FORT PUTNAM was formerly the principal fortress Hudson, "in the first ship, broke the unknown or citadel of the works erected during the war of wave" of the stream destined to immortalize his Independence, for the defence of the passes of the name: whilst to the north, it opens into a still Hudson and the Highlands, at West Point. It broader expanse, covered with the white sails of commanded the river and the opposite shore, as sloops and with steam-boats, trailing their long dark well as the other works upon both banks. The clouds behind them, between cultivated but pictucommand of the Hudson and the mountainous pas-resque banks, interspersed with villages, villas, ses of the Highlands, was indispensable for the and spires. tection of the greater part of the state of New-York against sudden incursions of the enemy from the sea coast, as well as for keeping open a perfectly secure communication between New England and the middle states, and had been accordingly regarded by Washington as all important to the success of These ruins are rich with the most hallowed asthe American arms. West Point, on the western sociations; for they are fraught with recollections bank of the Hudson, where the river, deviating from of heroism, liberty and virtue. There Arnold plotthe usual majestic directness of its course, bends ted the subjugation of his country, and, surrounded suddenly around that bold and lofty promontory, as he was by an army and a militia, unpaid, unwas selected for this purpose, from the natural strength of its position; and, during the first years of the war, was fortified under the direction of the most skilful engineers of the American and French armies, with a degree of expense and labor which, in the then enfeebled state of the nation, was truly astonishing. The preservation of this post was the cardinal point in the plan of more than one eventful campaign, and its surrender to the enemy was the great object of Arnold's treason. It was called at that time, and with justice, the Gibraltar of North America.

Since the peace of 1783, Fort Putnam, together with the other works of defence at that station, has been gradually dismantled, and at last suffered to fall to decay, so that it now appears a venerable ruin of massive military architecture, crowning the woody and rugged steep of a mountain.

As such, it is a feature almost unique in American scenery, reminding the traveller of the romantic ruined towers of defence in the gorges of the Pyrenees, or the feudal castles which still frown from the rocky banks of the Rhine. From its dilapidated bastions, the eye wanders over a wide sea of mountain ridges, rising one above, or beyond another, in every direction, until they suddenly descend in steep, rocky, and stupendous banks, to the mighty stream which flows silently at their base. Far away to the north you may trace the summits of other mountains of the same chain gradually receding from the river on each side, and leaving at their feet the rich plains of Dutchess and Orange counties, filled with farms and villages, and here and there bright with small lakes, and winding streams glittering in the sun. In every part of this magnificent view, the broad Hudson appears in all its grandeur; not, however, as it is usually seen, pouring its steady and unbroken current directly to the ocean, “ forth and right on," but apparently divided into a series of lakes, which, to the southward, are girt with the boldest mountain

clothed, and suffering, he could find none among them base enough to receive his gold, and participate in his treason. As we muse over this magnificent scene of great events, the imagination insensibly kindles, and the plain below, and the forts, and rocks, become peopled again with the soldiers and the chiefs of the revolution. The majestic WASHINGTON, the young and gallant HAMILTON, the veteran disciplinarian STEUBEN, the fearless PUTNAM, the daring WILLET, the cool and sagacious CLINTON, Successively pass before us. In the hollow recess of the bank beneath, the melancholy KosciUSKO was wont to mourn alone and without hope over the woes and the wrongs of Poland. Upon the cliffs on the right, the young and high-spirited LA FAYETTE often sat, meditating lofty thoughts of good to America, to France, to mankind, whilst bright and gorgeous visions of glory and freedom floated before him.

Amid the ruins of Fort Putnam, the patriot may find materials to animate him with fresh hopes for his country's future welfare, as well as to recall the noblest recollections of her past history. On the plain beneath his feet, are annually collected the chosen youth of that country, to be instructed in the highest attainments of science, and the best uses of military skill. There, as they daily tread the soil consecrated by the steps of heroes, sages, and patriots, the Genius of the place fires their ingenious breasts with a generous emulation of the illustrious dead. There, is an armory of mind, a living arsenal, which, in the worst extremes reserved for our country, will prove its cheapest, its surest, its proudest defence.

Virtue has this happiness, that she can subsist of herself, and knows how to exist without admirers, partisans and protectors; want of assistance and approbation does not only not affect her, but preserves-purifics-and renders her more perfect.

ORIGINAL.

SORROWS OF THE DORMER FAMILY;

BY HENRY A. FAY.

THE first part of this truly interesting and affecting narrative was crudely sketched by Dormer himself, the unhappy, yet just and upright, though afflicted father of the little family, whose manifold woes are the theme of the history. The manuscript was preserved by the person to whom Dormer confided it, for many years. This person died, and through his heirs I obtained it, on proviso that the facts should be put into a proper style, and a printed copy should be presented to the lady in whose possession it was, previous to mine, and who said she would not be without the story itself, if it was possible for her to retain it. She frequently solaced the loneliness of a weary hour, by poring and weeping over its details. But I will not keep the reader longer from the history. The closing hiatus, left in it, of the writer's history, is supplied by an accomplished pen, and in a finished style, worthy of the exceedingly fascinating incidents which are narrated in the whole story.

London, March 4th, A. D. 1740. I was born in this great British metropolis, a little upwards of forty years ago. My amiable wife, the partner of my bosom, was ten years younger than myself. Our mutual joys and woes exceed in their description and variety, in the entrancing nature of the happy hours, and the overwhelming affliction of the sorrowful ones, almost any thing of such a nature, which ever has befallen a single humble family, within the recollection of any one to whom my story has been related.

poser of all events had bound our spirits in, ere they had been imparted to our bodies and minds, to animate our mortal clay. Doubtlessly we were made for each other; she to make my retreat from the cares of business and the world happy, and I, to encounter the rough and stormy scenes of life, which are passed for gain, amid the collision of contending interests, the perplexing cares of trade, the investing of capital, the competition for foreign markets and quick voyages, the necessary vigilance to guard against the unhallowed combina tions of unprincipled villains, who throng the highways, the haunts and the circles of the spirits and enterprise of the mercantile mind. As to my subsequent occupations in life, they were not confined exclusively to commerce, as my hapless lot will show.

Frequently, little Miss Walsingham, which was the maiden name of my future bride, would look at me in the street, as I chanced to stare at her in passing, without knowing why: I withdrew my ardent gaze in shamefacedness from her rosy cheek, and ruby, pouting lips; and she dropped her melting blue eye from the encounter with mine, and blushed, and was so agitated in her step, that the least obstacle at her feet would have endangered her progress. Such occasional meetings were frequent, yet I never knew her name, nor she mine, until years subsequently.

My father died in the autumn of 1706. And I was only six years of age. It was a dreadful blow My own parents, my wife's, and our ancestors, to the family. My eldest brother was but twentywere among the most respectable of the middle four years old, and was, by the will of our father, gentry of England. My father was engaged in appointed executor and guardian of the family the lucrative occupation of a merchant. His ves- estate of the children. There were six male memsels were abroad upon the ocean, bound to the re-bers of the family left, and two female. John was motest parts of the habitable globe. Some of them were moored at the noble quays of London, others lay with their hardy crews beneath the rays of a tropical sun, in those climates where grow the costly products of oriental and occidental plains, and warm, perennially-smiling, and ever-sunny slopes, which knew no dreary winters, no driving snows, no pinching frosts, nor searching-wintry

blasts.

Mrs. Dormer and myself had been strangers until about seven months previous to our union. Yet we had at one interval of time, lived within a stone's throw of each other's residences, for the space of two years. We frequently saw each other then, and remained strangers, although years afterwards, we sat at one festive board, day after day, and shared the same pillow at night, in lawful and heaven-hallowed union. At the time when we resided so near together, we not only frequently met, but actually appeared to be mutually attracted towards each other, by some secret sympathy of souls, or impulse of feeling, unaccountable, mysterious, and indefinable. Perchance it was that heavenly tie, which the great Creator and Dis

the eldest son, Hiram was the second, William the third, Charles the fourth, Francis, (myself) the fifth, and George the sixth, being yet an infant. In addition to this list of children is to be added the name of an only daughter, Jane, who, with her mother, constituted the female portion of the bereaved family. Jane was only three and a half years old, at her father's much lamented decease.

Our mother was the second wife of my father, and only the four youngest children were her own. The others were by the first wife. My mother had married late in life, and was scarcely yet thirteen years possessed of the tranquil sweets of domestic bliss, when Heaven deprived her of her doating husband, and kind protector. The loss of my father depressed my mother's spirits. She resigned herself to all the luxury of woe; if giving free vent to grief, if mourning in tears and sighs, from morn to night, may be called luxury. even the necessity of attending to the welfare of her children, could attract her from the deeply seated sorrow. She was a widow, desolate and disconsolate. She pined away like a withered flower, whose core and root, the frost had touched

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and cruelly blasted. She grew pale and passionless. Her full cheek shrunk into awful hollowness: her bright eyes faded and fell back deep under her brow: her noble forin became attenuated and ghastly. Her lip lost its hue; her look its lustre of intellect, and life seemed just to linger, as if reluctant to quit its frail tenement. Her step became the gliding of a shadowy spectre, and sheer weakness and imbecility of mind and body reduced her so low, that she at last became unable, one morning, to rise from her couch. She never did rise from it again. In the short space of half a year after her husband's death, she yielded up her breath and life to the sad and stern decree, which doomed her husband's death to be the signal for her own dissolution. I was but seven years old when thus deprived of both parents and kind protectors, in this world of trouble and sorrow.

and full maturity, of the tender affections which sprung up in the garden of their bosoms, and bloomed in the fairy bowers of their imaginations. Suffice it to say that he grew tall, manly, and pleasing to female eyes, and improved in personal and mental charms, from year to year. His eye was large, hazel-colored, and piercing. Her's was blue and expressive. His manners were lively and insinuating; he was the life of every company and of every circle in which he moved. She was also gay, witty, and shone in company with the same brilliancy of intellect that he did. There certainly could not possibly be two of either sex, selected from all the world, who combined within the little world of their own feelings, actions, appearance and influence, more of the suaviter in modo, the agreeable and the entertaining.

The stern and unyielding father of John and of myself, and the brother-in-law of Laura, could not

The family was soon dispersed. Charles, Jane and I, were sent to different relatives, some hun-fully enter into John's feelings; he could not divest dred miles from London. John remained in the city, to dispose of the estate to the best advantage. Hiram was then at sea, as supercargo of one of the vessels belonging to the estate, and William, being about nineteen years old, visited an uncle in Scot-He went further than this negative state of things. land.

One remarkable episode to this preface of my story, is necessary for the reader's information. John, the eldest son, was highly enamored of a younger sister of his father's second wife. This young girl, Laura, reciprocated John's affections. She did not conceal her ardent attachment from the world, and it was universally spoken of in the circles in which the lovers moved. But a dark and threatening cloud came over the sky of their hopes. John's father forbade the thought of such an union. "What!" exclaimed he; "my son marry my wife's sister!" Our father was stern in his opinions and decisions. He deemed it to be indelicate for the father and son to marry sisters, and he also opposed it on the score of pecuniary policy. Laura had no income of her own, and my father considered it absolutely essential, that every opportunity should be seized, and every advantage made the most of, to increase the opulence and high rank of the Dormer connection.

himself of his views of family aggrandizementhe could not yield his consent to the wedding of Laura and John, nor even to the idea, though most remote, of their continuing to love one another.

After he had extorted a solemn vow from his son that he would never marry Laura, he commenced a train of negociations with John and a young lady of a very wealthy family, in order to bring about a speedy marriage between them.

The filial tenderness of John was such, that doubtless he would in time have sacrificed his love for Laura, his peace of mind, and future happiness, and no doubt, his life too, in that same sacrifice of love, all to gratify the expressed wishes of his ambitious, yet well-meaning father. He would probably have married his father's choice, and thus have immolated upon the shrine of avarice, himself and his Laura. But bitterly that father would have repented. For his own cold calculations would have been frustrated by the death of his son, a victim of disappointed love. Laura's feelings were also too much involved to allow her to survive the blasting of her affections. How mysterious are heaven's ways. Who, amid all these distracting perplexities of love, and hopelessness of love, of struggle between duty and inclination, in the breast of a young man-who, amid all these things could

Ah! the sly little deity who presides over the hearts of the young of both sexes, often sets at naught all the fine-spun webs of avarice, and eva-have supposed that the Gordian knot would have porates the air-built castles of grandeur, which ambitious and calculating parents are too apt to erect in the fairy regions of their imaginations.

been cut, by the untimely and awful death of that kind yet stern parent? It was an apoplectic stroke that in one unexpected blow, levelled all the prosOur father extorted a promise from John that he pects of my father, and of the family, into the dust. would never marry Laura. John loved his father My father was seized in the midst of a company, to the very extreme of fondness. He really and upon the Exchange, with the fatal disorder. One truly doated upon his father, who was every way minute he was talking in a bargain of merchandize worthy of the most devoted filial affection. The and money, exerting all the skill of an experienced welfare and aggrandizement of his family absorb-merchant, the eloquence of a persuasive tongue, ed his whole capacious soul and intellect, energies, the influence of wealth, and respectable standing; time, and thoughts.

and his mind filled with schemes of future grandeur Laura and John had been acquainted from their of his family. The spectators beheld in him a early years. John was about ten years old when man, likely to live many years, and to bear much he first saw little Laura, his future wife. While sway in the mart of commerce, and in the pecuhis father was getting into a matrimonial engage- niary transactions of the great capital of England. ment with the eldest sister, who was afterwards The next fleeting moment he was stretched at full my mother, John was falling over head and ears in length, upon the sanded floor, amid the feet of the love with little Laura. In this part of my narrative, people upon 'Change, a cold, livid, corpse—a mere I cannot dilate upon the birth, growth, development mass of inert matter: the loud and authoritative

voice hushed into the stillness and quietude of lent captain of the vessel. Hiram detected the death; the sparkling eye, dimmed and lustreless; the broad, polished, and frowning brow, gazed upon by others as a thing which had lost its life and expression: the haughty curl of the proud lip was gone, and vacuity of thought was substituted in the seat of apparent self-dignity. The great merchant, the stern and forbidding father, the once insurmountable obstacle to the commingling of two fond souls into one, was dead!

captain's frauds, and declared his conviction to the captain himself, who was so enraged that he swore at my brother, as an ignorant stripling; too young and too destitute of business knowledge, to be able to discriminate among the complicated calculations of gain and loss, the just result of the rise and fall of markets, and told my brother that he was unfit for his station. Hiram replied to the captain that he was a villain. This quarrel took In the first ebullitions of grief, the family suffer- place in the cabin. The captain, conscious of his ed mingled emotions. The sudden and entirely own villany, and danger of exposure, became exunexpected death of my father, created astonish- asperated to the highest degree. He was a man of ment and sorrow. A great estate and an extensive most violent and brutal passions. He snatched a business had suddenly lost its sole manager. Not pistol from the table and fired it at my brother's one of the family was fitted for supplying his place, breast; the fatal bullet entered his heart. He fell, in taking proper care of the interests of a great and lay weltering in his blood on the cabin floor, establishment, and of a large number of persons. until the crew, hearing the report of the pistol, My mother was completely prostrated by despondency. The eldest son was only twenty-four years of age, and had been so excessively devoted to his father-had been so yielding to his wishes, and so completely dependant, in body and mind, that he was not at all prepared to take the guardianship of the family and estate. Nevertheless, he was obliged to do so, and did so. He called to his aid some older men, and matters seemed to be in a fair train for having the future interests of the family properly conducted and sustained. But, as has been already mentioned, my mother pined away, and died of a broken heart, within six months after the decease of my father.

John had really so much loved his father, that almost every other thought was absorbed in grief for his loss. Even Laura was for months forgotten. As time wore away, the heaviness of an afflicted mind became diminished. John's new and engrossing duties as guardian of a family-his occupations as a man of business, to a considerable degree, wiled away the intense pressure of mental affliction; and thoughts of Laura, and wedded bliss with her, began to flit across the atmosphere of his feelings, amid the bustle of business, and in the solitary contemplations of midnight secrecy and loneliness.

The Power that governs fate, now frequently brought the two into more frequent contact, and they gazed upon each other, and talked together, and were mutually conscious that the death of both, or their union for life, would soon ensue. The fatal and insuperable vow of John to his parent, intervened. He could not so insult his memory as to break the vow. What was to be done? How the two overcame their scruples cannot easily be told in minute detail; but we can all imagine that a burning passion consumed the moral obstacles which half smothered its flame, for they were married.

rushed below, and beheld the dreadful spectacle. The ruthless monster who had murdered Hiram, stood over him, with the murderous weapon in his hand, calmly surveying his horrid work. "Take that accursed mutineer's dead body,” said the captain to the crew, "and cast it to the waves, for fishes' food. He levelled this pistol at my head, and would have killed me in a fit of passion, because I censured him for neglect of duty, if I had not wrenched the instrument of death from him; and in our mutual struggle, the pistol was acci dentally discharged, and the ball pierced his own vitals."

The crew believed this story at the time, and it was not until many years subsequently, that the true circumstances transpired. Years after the murder, when this wretched and infamous man was upon his death bed, he confessed the foul deed and all its concomitant circumstances, and hoped by repentance to escape that future and eternal punishment which he knew awaited all who perish in a career of wickedness, and indifference to religious awakenings.

But as it was, the crew lifted the bloody corpse of the unfortunate young man from its ensanguined bed, and doing over his mortal remains, the last sad ceremonies of a sea funeral, they consigned the body to the deep.

The third brother, William, was soon after his father's death seized with a pulmonary complaint, which hurried him also into the tomb.

I can remember well the desolateness of my feelings, while brooding over these family afflictions. Often, while I yet remained in London, and upon the coming of a Sabbath day, my youthful steps would take me to the great public promenade, Hyde Park. There thronged the gay and happy, rich and poor, the court and the soldiers, the aged and young; were seen walking, riding, now gazing at the beautiful tame deer in the groves, This episode became essential to the full illus-anon looking with interest upon the groups of little tration of our narrative, and therefore we now water crafts, sailing up and down the Serpentine proceed to the main history of the Sorrows of the river, which meandered through the park. Her Dormer Family. Majesty Queen Anne, in all the splendor of gor

It will be recollected that I mentioned the dis-geous attire, and accompanied by a train of supersion of our family after my father's death, and perbly dressed ladies and gentlemen, was occasionthat Hiram was then at sea. Being supercargo of ally to be seen upon the promenade. She could his father's ship in the West Indies, and particu-even be overheard to talk of her sorrows, of the larly attentive to his duties, he was too keen an death of her sister and predecessor, Mary, and of observer of passing events, to please the fraudu- the unnatural events which drove her father James

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