As we have intimated, the portrait at the beginning of this article is remarkably good. Mr. Herbert is about five feet ten high, of athletic habits, and an untiring and fast walker; fond, of course, of all field sports, especially horsemanship and shooting, and priding himself upon killing as much if not more game than any other gentleman in the country out of New-York.
TRENTON FALLS
In a story called Edith Linsey, written by Mr. Willis, soon after he left college, occurs the following description of Trenton Falls:
"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!