"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:—
"Like a ring of bells whose sound the wind still alters,"
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 not love some stream in his youth? Who is there in whose vision of the past there does not sparkle up, from every picture of childhood, a spring or a rivulent woven through the darkened and torn woof of first affections like a thread of unchanged silver? How do you interpret the instinctive yearning with which you search for the river-side or the fountain in every scene of nature—the clinging unaware to the river's course when a truant in the fields in June—the dull void you find in every landscape of which it is not the ornament and the centre? For myself, I hold with the Greek: "Water is the first principle of all things: we were made from it and we shall be resolved into it.""
Of subsequent visits to this loveliest of spots, years after, Mr. Willis has given descriptions in letters addressed to General Morris for publication in the Home Journal, and we are soon to have from Putnam in a beautiful volume all that he has written on the subject, together with notices of the manner in which he enjoyed himself at Mr. Moore's delightful hotel at the Falls, which is represented as farthest of all summer resorts from the turmoil of the world and nearest of all to the gates of Paradise. We borrow from these letters a few characteristic and tempting paragraphs:
"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.