It was Troup who took him for his first sail up the Hudson, and except for the men who managed the boat, they went alone.  Troup was a good listener, and for a time Hamilton chattered gaily as the boat sped up the river, jingling rhymes on the great palisades, which looked like the walls of some Brobdingnagian fortress, and upon the gorgeous masses of October colouring swarming over the perpendicular heights of Jersey and the slopes and bluffs of New York.  It was a morning, and a piece of nature, to make the quicksilver in Hamilton race.  The arch was blue, the tide was bluer, the smell of salt was in the keen and frosty air.  Two boats with full white sails flew up the river.  On either bank the primeval forest had burst in a night into scarlet and gold, pale yellow and crimson, bronze, pink, the flaming hues of the Tropics, and the delicate tints of hot-house roses.  Hamilton had never seen such a riot of colour in the West Indies.  They passed impenetrable thickets close to the water’s edge, ravines, cliffs, irregular terraces on the hillside, gorges, solitary heights, all flaunting their charms like a vast booth which has but a day in which to sell its wares.  They sped past the beautiful peninsula, then the lawns of Philipse Manor.  Hamilton stepped suddenly to the bow of the boat and stood silent for a long while.

The stately but narrow end of the Hudson was behind; before him rolled a wide and ever widening majestic flood, curving among its hills and palisades, through the glory of its setting and the soft mists of distance, until the far mountains it clove trembled like a mirage.  The eye of Hamilton’s mind followed it farther and farther yet.  It seemed to him that it cut the world in two.  The sea he had had with him always, but it had been the great chasm between himself and life, and he had often hated it.  This mighty river, haughty and calm in spite of the primeval savagery of its course, beat upon the gates of his soul, beat them down, filled him with a sense of grandeur which made him tremble.  He had a vision of the vastness and magnificence of the New World, of the great lonely mountains in the North, with their countless lakes hidden in the immensity of a trackless forest, of other mountain ranges equally wild and lonely, cutting the monotony of plains and prairies, and valleys full of every delight.  All that Hamilton had read or heard of the immense area beyond or surrounding the few cities and hamlets of the American colonies, flew to coherence, and he had a sudden appreciation of the stupendousness of this new untravelled world, understood that with its climate, fertility, and beauty, its large nucleus of civilization, its destiny must be as great as Europe’s, nor much dissimilar, no matter what the variance of detail.  The noblest river in the world seemed to lift its voice like a prophet, and the time came—­after his visit to Boston—­when Hamilton listened to it with a thrill of impatient pride and white-hot patriotism.  But to-day he felt only the grandeur of life as he never had felt it before, felt his soul merge into this mighty unborn soul of a nation sleeping in the infinity, which the blue flood beneath him spoke of, almost imaged; with no premonition that his was the destiny to quicken that soul to its birth.