"Trenton Falls is rather a misnomer. I scarcely know what you would call it, but the wonder of nature which bears the name is a tremendous torrent, whose bed, for several miles, is sunk fathoms deep into the earth—a roaring and dashing stream, so far below the surface of the forest in which it is lost, that you would think, as you come suddenly upon the edge of its long precipice, that it was a river in some inner world (coiled within ours, as we in the outer circle of the firmament,) and laid open by some Titanic throe that had cracked clear asunder the crust of this 'shallow earth.' The idea is rather assisted if you happen to see below you, on its abysmal shore, a party of adventurous travellers; for, at that vast depth, and in contrast with the gigantic trees and rocks, the same number of well-shaped pismires, dressed in the last fashions, and philandering upon your parlor floor, would be about of their apparent size and distinctness.

"They showed me at Eleusis the well by which Proserpine ascends to the regions of day on her annual visit to the plains of Thessaly—but with the genius loci at my elbow in the shape of a Greek girl as lovely as Phryne, my memory reverted to the bared axle of the earth in the bed of this American river, and I was persuaded (looking the while at the feronière of gold sequins on the Phidian forehead of my Katinka) that supposing Hades in the centre of the earth, you are nearer to it by some fathoms at Trenton. I confess I have had, since my first descent into those depths, an uncomfortable doubt of the solidity of the globe—how the deuse it can hold together with such a crack in its bottom!

"It was a night to play Endymion, or do any Tomfoolery that could be laid to the charge of the moon, for a more omnipresent and radiant atmosphere of moonlight never sprinkled the wilderness with silver. It was a night in which to wish it might never be day again—a night to be enamored of the stars, and bid God bless them like human creatures on their bright journey—a night to love in, to dissolve in—to do every thing but what night is made for—sleep! Oh heaven! when I think how precious is life in such moments; how the aroma—the celestial bloom and flower of the soul—the yearning and fast-perishing enthusiasm of youth—waste themselves in the solitude of such nights on the senseless and unanswering air; when I wander alone, unloving and unloved, beneath influences that could inspire me with the elevation of a seraph, were I at the ear of a human creature that could summon forth and measure my limitless capacity of devotion—when I think this, and feel this, and so waste my existence in vain yearnings—I could extinguish the divine spark within me like a lamp on an unvisited shrine, and thank Heaven for an assimilation to the animals I walk among! And that is the substance of a speech I made to Job as a sequitur of a well-meant remark of his own, that 'it was a pity Edith Linsey was not there.' He took the clause about the 'animals' to himself, and I made an apology for the same a year after. We sometimes give our friends, quite innocently, such terrible knocks in our rhapsodies!

"Most people talk of the sublimity of Trenton, but I have haunted it by the week together for its mere loveliness. The river, in the heart of that fearful chasm, is the most varied and beautiful assemblage of the thousand forms and shapes of running water that I know in the world. The soil and the deep-striking roots of the forest terminate far above you, looking like a black rim on the inclosing precipices; the bed of the river and its sky-sustaining walls are of solid rock, and, with the tremendous descent of the stream—forming for miles one continuous succession of falls and rapids—the channel is worn into curves and cavities which throw the clear waters into forms of inconceivable brilliancy and variety. It is a sort of half twilight below, with here and there a long beam of sunshine reaching down to kiss the lip of an eddy or form a rainbow over a fall, and the reverberating and changing echoes:—

maintain a constant and most soothing music, varying at every step with the varying phase of the current. Cascades of from twenty to thirty feet, over which the river flies with a single and hurrying leap (not a drop missing from the glassy and bending sheet), occur frequently as you ascend; and it is from these that the place takes its name. But the falls, though beautiful, are only peculiar from the dazzling and unequaled rapidity with which the waters come to the leap. If it were not for the leaf which drops wavering down into the abysm from trees apparently painted on the sky, and which is caught away by the flashing current as if the lightning had suddenly crossed it, you would think the vault of the steadfast heavens a flying element as soon. The spot in that long gulf of beauty that I best remember is a smooth descent of some hundred yards, where the river in full and undivided volume skims over a plane as polished as a table of scagliola, looking, in its invisible speed, like one mirror of gleaming but motionless crystal. Just above, there is a sudden turn in the glen which sends the water like a catapult against the opposite angle of the rock, and, in the action of years, it has worn out a cavern of unknown depth, into which the whole mass of the river plunges with the abandonment of a flying fiend into hell, and, reappearing like the angel that has pursued him, glides swiftly but with divine serenity on its way. (I am indebted for that last figure to Job, who travelled with a Milton in his pocket, and had a natural redolence of 'Paradise Lost' in his conversation.)

"Much as I detest water in small quantities (to drink), I have a hydromania in the way of lakes, rivers, and waterfalls. It is, by much, the belle in the family of the elements. Earth is never tolerable unless disguised in green. Air is so thin as only to be visible when she borrows drapery of water; and Fire is so staringly bright as to be unpleasant to the eyesight; but water! soft, pure, graceful water! there is no shape into which you can throw her that she does not seem lovelier than before. She can borrow nothing of her sisters. Earth has no jewels in her lap so brilliant as her own spray pearls and emeralds; Fire has no rubies like what she steals from the sunset; Air has no robes like the grace of her fine-woven and ever-changing drapery of silver. A health (in wine!) to Water!

"Who is there that did