"I was here twenty years ago, but the fairest things slip easiest out of the memory, and I had half forgotten Trenton. To tell the truth, I was a little ashamed, to compare the faded and shabby picture of it in my mind with the reality before me, and if the waters of the Falls had been, by any likelihood, the same that flowed over when I was here before, I should have looked them in the face, I think, with something of the embarrassment with which one meets, half-rememberingly, after years of separation, the ladies one has vowed to love for ever.

"The peculiarity of Trenton Falls, I fancy, consists a good deal in the space in which you are compelled to see them. You walk a few steps from the hotel through the wood, and come to a descending staircase of a hundred steps, the different bends of which are so over-grown with wild shrubbery, that you cannot see the ravine till you are fairly down upon its rocky floor. Your path hence, up to the first Fall, is along a ledge cut out of the base of the cliff that overhangs the torrent, and when you go to the foot of the descending sheet, you find yourself in very close quarters with a cataract—rocky walls all round you—and the appreciation of power and magnitude, perhaps, somewhat heightened by the confinement of the place—as a man would have a much more realizing sense of a live lion, shut up with him in a basement parlor, than he would of the same object, seen from an elevated and distant point of view.

"The usual walk (through this deep cave open at the top) is about half a mile in length, and its almost subterranean river, in that distance, plunges over four precipices in exceedingly beautiful cascades. On the successive rocky terraces between the falls, the torrent takes every variety of rapids and whirlpools, and, perhaps, in all the scenery of the world, there is no river, which, in the same space, presents so many of the various shapes and beauties of running and falling water. The Indian name of the stream (the Kanata, which means the amber river) expresses one of its peculiarities, and, probably from the depth of shade cast by the two dark and overhanging walls 'twixt which it flows, the water is everywhere of a peculiarly rich lustre and color, and, in the edges of one or two of the cascades, as yellow as gold. Artists, in drawing this river, fail, somehow, in giving the impression of deep-down-itude which is produced by the close approach of the two lofty walls of rock, capped by the overleaning woods, and with the sky apparently resting, like a ceiling, upon the leafy architraves.... If there were truly, as the poets say figuratively, "worlds within worlds," this would look as if an earthquake had cracked open the outer globe, and exposed, through the yawning fissure, one of the rivers of the globe below—the usual underground level of "down among the dead men," being, as you walk upon its banks, between you and the daylight.

"Considering the amount of surprise and pleasure which one feels in a walk up the ravine at Trenton, it is remarkable how little one finds to say about it, the day after. Is it that mere scenery, without history, is enjoyable without being suggestive, or, amid the tumult of the rushing torrent at one's feet, is the milk of thought too much agitated for the cream to rise? I fancied yesterday, as I rested on the softest rock I could find at the upper end of the ravine, that I should tumble you out a letter to-day, with ideas pitching forth like saw-logs over a waterfall; but my memory has nothing in it to-day but the rocks and rapids it took in—the talent wrapped in its napkin of delight remaining in unimproved statu-quo-sity. One certainly gets the impression, while the sight and hearing are so overwhelmed, that one's mind is famously at work, and that we shall hear from it to-morrow; but it is Jean Paul, I think, who says that 'the mill makes the most noise when there is no grist in the hopper.'

"We have had the full of the moon and a cloudless sky for the last two or three nights, and of course we have walked the ravine till the 'small hours,' seeing with wonder the transforming effects of moonlight and its black shadows on the falls and precipices. I have no idea (you will be glad to know) of trying to reproduce these sublimities on paper—at least not with my travelling stock of verbs and adjectives. To 'sandwich the moon in a muffin,' one must have time and a ladder of dictionaries. But one or two effects struck me which perhaps are worth briefly naming, and I will throw into the lot a poetical figure, which you may use in your next song....

"The fourth Fall, (or the one that is flanked by the ruins of a saw-mill) is, perhaps, a hundred feet across; and its curve over the upper rock and its break upon the lower one, form two parallel lines, the water everywhere falling the same distance with the evenness of an artificial cascade. The stream not being very full, just now, it came over, in twenty or thirty places, thicker than elsewhere; and the effect, from a distance, as the moonlight lay full upon it, was that of twenty or thirty immovable marble columns connected by transparent curtains of falling lace, and with bases in imitation of foam. Now it struck me that this might suggest a new and fanciful order of architecture, suitable at least to the structure of green-houses, the glass roofs of which are curved over and slope to the ground with very much the contour of a waterfall....

"Subterranean as this foaming river looks by day, it looks like a river in cloud-land by night. The side of the ravine which is in shadow, is one undistinguishable mass of black, with its wavy upper edge in strong relief against the sky, and, as the foaming stream catches the light from the opposite and moonlit side, it is outlined distinctly on its bed of darkness, and seems winding its way between hills of clouds, half black, half luminous. Below, where all is deep shadow except the river, you might fancy it a silver mine laid open to your view amid subterranean darkness by the wand of an enchanter, or (if you prefer a military trope, my dear General), a long white plume laid lengthwise between the ridges of a cocked hat."