Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, "the Paradise of America". (Current and Coming).

Jenny Lind, the remarkable Swedish diva who took the United States by storm during a visit in 1851, described the region around Mount Holyoke in the Connecticut River valley as "the Paradise of America" The mountain was the region's central attraction, renowned not for its awe-inspiring height (Ralph Waldo Emerson called it a "hill;" Sylvia Plath a "mere truncated hillock"), but rather for its magnificent outlook over the bucolic landscape along the Connecticut River, and its central attraction, a natural phenomenon known as the oxbow.

Today we associate this scenery with one of the icons of American landscape painting--Thomas Cole's View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) (illustrated above). Contrary to common belief, the painting did not put the oxbow on the map. It was already so well known that Cole went there to make sketches for what he felt would be a highly saleable painting. In the same letter to his patron Luman Reed in which he expressed this view, he wrote: "I have already commenced a view from Mount Holyoke; it is about the finest scene I have in my sketchbook and is well known--it will be novel and I think effective." The region was the second most popular tourist destination in New England during much of the nineteenth century and figured in the books of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Cooper.

An exhibition that examines the importance of this locale in nineteenth-century art and literature is fittingly on view at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts, from September 3 to December 8. It includes approximately one hundred paintings, prints, and photographs, as well as ephemera and memorabilia, and is entitled Changing Prospects: The View from Mount Holyoke.

Mount Holyoke College, situated minutes away from the mountain for which it was named, was founded by Mary Lyon in 1837 as Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. The college has always used the mountain and river as outdoor laboratories for scientific studies and for other pursuits. One tradition dating from the 1870s, called Seniors' Mountain Day required members of that class to hike from halfway up the mountain to its summit, where they slept overnight in Prospect House, clad in muslin nightgowns stitched up for them by sophomores.

The first accommodation for tourists was erected ...