August 11th, 1851
Herman Melville, with a party of friends and relatives, stays overnight in the observatory on Mount Greylock.
Evert Duyckinck, one of the party, wrote to his wife: "The ascent of Saddleback the highest mountain in Massachusetts came off grandly with a party of eleven…--a night encampment in an old box called an observatory on the summit & of course sleepless. But people don't go there to sleep: so a huge bonfire was lighted. Wrapped in buffaloes [robes] we stalked around in the cloud Ossianic ghosts. The run rise was a failure; not so the sweeping clouds below us rolling in vapory masses, through their looped raggedness disclosing the lower world."
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