5

on the leaves, and the small voice of the nightingale (singing, like nothing but himself, sweetest in the darkness) seems an intensitive and a low burthen to the general anthem of the earth-as it were a single voice among instruments.

I had what Wordsworth calls a "couchant ear" in my youth, and my story will wait, dear reader, while I tell you of another harmony that I learned to love in the wilderness.

There will come sometimes in the spring-say in May, or whenever the snow-drops and sulphur butterflies are tempted out by the first timorous sunshine-there will come, I say, in that yearning and youthOur tent shall be pitched on renewing season, a warm shower at noon. the skirts of a forest of young pines, and the evergreen foliage, if foliage it may be called, shall be a daily refreshment to our eye while watching, with the west wind upon our cheeks, the unclothed branches of the elm. The rain descends softly and warm; but with the sunset the clouds break away, and it grows suddenly cold enough to freeze. The next morning you shall come out with me to a hill-side looking upon the south, and lie down with your ear to the earth. The pine tassels hold in every four of their fine fingers a drop of rain frozen like a pearl in a long ear-ring, sustained in their loose grasp by the rigidity of the cold. The sun grows warm at ten, and the slight green fingers begin to relax and yield, and by eleven they are all dropping their icy pearls upon the dead leaves with a murmur through the forest like the swarming of the bees of Hybla. There is not much variety in its music, but it is a pleasant monotone for thought, and if you have a restless fever in your bosom (as I had, when I learned to love it, for the travel which has corrupted the heart and the ear that it soothed and satisfied then) you may And it is better than the lie down with a crooked root under your head in the skirts of the forest, and thank Heaven for an anodyne to care. voice of your friend, or the song of your ladye-love, for it exacts no gratitude, and will not desert you ere the echo dies upon the wind.

Oh, how many of these harmonies there are!-how many that we too constant to be heard!" I could hear, and how many that are go back to my youth, now, with this thread of recollection, and unsepulture a hoard of simple and long-buried joys that would bring the blush upon my cheek to think how my senses are dulled since such things could give me pleasure! Is there no "well of Kanathos" for renewing the youth of the soul?-no St. Hilary's cradle?—no elixir to cast the slough of heart-sickening and heart-tarnishing custom? Find me an alchymy for that, with your alembic and crucible, and you may resolve to dross again your philosopher's stone!

II.

Every body who makes the passage of the Erie canal, stops at the half-way town of Utica to visit a wonder of nature fourteen miles to the west of it, called Trenton Falls. It would be becoming in me, before mentioning the Falls, however, to sing the praises of Utica and its twenty thousand inhabitants-having received much hospitality from the worthy burghers, and philandered up and down their well-flagged trottoir very much to my private satisfaction. I should scorn any man's judgment who should attempt to convince me that the Erie water, which comes down the canal a hundred and fifty miles and passes through the market place of that pleasant town, has not communicated to the hearts of its citizens the expansion and depth of the parent lake from which it is

drawn. I have a theory on that subject with which I intend to surprise the world whenever politics and Mr. Bulwer draw less engrossingly on its attention. Will any one tell me that the dark eyes I knew there, and whose like for softness and meaning I have inquired for in vain through Italy, and the voice that accompanied their gaze-(that Pasta, in her divinest out-gush of melody and soul, alone recalls to me)—that these, and the noble heart, and high mind, and even the genius, that were other gifts of the same marvel among women-that these were born of common parentage, and nursed by the air of a demi-metropolis? We were but the kindest of friends, that bright creature and myself, and I may say, without charging myself with the blindness of love, that I believe in my heart she was the foster-child of the water-spirits on whose wandering streamlet she lived-that the thousand odours that swept down from the wilderness upon Lake Erie, and the unseen but wild and innumerable influences of nature, or whatever you call that which makes the Indian a believer in the Great Spirit-that these came down with those clear waters, ministering to the mind and watching over the budding beauty of this noble and most high-hearted woman! If you do not believe it, I should like you to tell me how else such a creature was "raised," as they phrase it in Virginia. I shall hold to my theory till you furnish me with a more reasonable one.

We heard at the hotel that there were several large parties at Trenton Falls, and with an abridgement of our toilets in our pockets, Job and I gallopped out of Utica about four o'clock of as bright a summer's afternoon as was ever promised in the almanac. We drew rein a mile or two out of town, and dawdled along the wild road more leisurely, Job's Green Mountain proportions fitting to the saddle something in the manner and relative fitness of a skeleton on a poodle. By the same token he rode safely, the looseness of his bones accommodating itself with singular facility to the irregularities in the pace of the surprised animal beneath him.

I dislike to pass over the minutest detail of a period of my life that will be rather interesting in my biography, (it is my intention to be famous enough to merit that distinction, and I would recommend to my friends to be noting my "little peculiarities "), and with this posthumous benevolence in my heart, I simply record, that our conversation on the road turned upon Edith Linsey-at this time the lady of my constant love-for whose sake and at whose bidding I was just concluding, (with success I presumed,) a probation of three years of absence, silence, hard study, and rigid morals, and upon whose parting promise (God forgive her!) I had built my uttermost gleaning and sand of earthly hope and desire. I tell you in the tail of this mocking paragraph, dear reader, that the bend of the rainbow spans not the earth more perfectly than did the love of that woman my hopes of future bliss; and that ephemeral arc does not sooner melt into the clouds-but I am anticipating my story.

Job's extraordinary appearance, as he extricated himself from his horse, usually attracted the entire attention of the by-standers at a strange inn, and under cover of this, I usually contrived to get into the house and commit him by ordering the dinner as soon as it could be got ready. Else, if it was in the neighbourhood of scenery, he was off till heaven knew when, and as I had that delicacy for his feelings never to dine without him, you can imagine the necessity of my greedy manœuvre.

We dined upon the trout of the glorious stream we had come to see; and as our host's eldest daughter waited upon us, (recorded in Job's journal, in my possession since his death, as "the most comely and gracious virgin" he had seen in his travels), we felt bound to adapt our conversation to the purity of her mind, and discussed only the philosophical point, whether the beauty of the stream could be tasted in the flavour of the fish-Job for it, I against it. The argument was only interrupted by the entrance of an apple pudding, so hot that our tongues were fully occupied in removing it from place to place as the mouth felt its heat inconvenient, and then, being in a country of liberty and equality, and the damsel in waiting, as Job smilingly remarked, as much a lady as the President's wife, he requested permission to propose her health in a cool tumbler of cider, and we adjourned to the moonlight.

III.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the existence of Trenton Falls was not known. It was discovered, like Pæstum, by a wandering artist, when there was a town of ten thousand inhabitants, a canal, a theatre, a liberty pole, and forty churches within fourteen miles of it. It may be mentioned to the credit of the Americans, that in the "hardness" of character of which travellers complain, there is the soft trait of a passion for scenery, and before the fact of its discovery had got well into the "Cahawba Democrat " and " Go-the-whole-hog-Courier," there was a splendid wooden hotel on the edge of the precipice, with a French cook, soda-water and olives, and a law was passed by the Kentucky Travellers' Club, requiring a hanging-bird's-nest from the trees "frowning down the awful abysm," (so expressed in the regulation), as a qualification for membership. Thenceforward to the present time it has been a place of fashionable resort during the summer solstice, and the pine woods, in which the hotel stands, being impervious to the sun, it is prescribed by oculists for gentlemen and ladies with weak eyes. If the luxury of corn-cutters had penetrated to the United States, it might be prescribed for tender feet as well-the soft floor of pine-tassels spread under the grassless woods, being considered an improvement upon Turkey carpets and greensward.

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 tra vellers; 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 parlour 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 Phryné, 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

feroniére 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 deuce it can hold together with such a crack in its bottom!

It was a night to play Endymion, or do any Tom-foolery 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 enamoured 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, when he took occasion to mention it on his death-bed! 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 enclosing 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 unequalled 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,

Scenery and a Scène.

you would think the plane of the stedfast 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, re-appearing 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.)
It is, by much, the
Much as I detest water in small quantities (to drink) I have a hydro-
Earth is never tolerable unless
mania in the way of lakes, rivers, and waterfalls.
belle in the family of the Elements.
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!

from every
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,
picture of childhood, a spring or a rivulet 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*."

IV.

The awkward thing in all story-telling is transition. Invention you do not need if you have experience; for fact is stranger than fiction. A beginning in these days of startling abruptness is as simple as open your mouth; and when you have once begun you can end whenever you like, and leave the sequel to the reader's imagination: but the My education on that hinges of a story,-the turning gracefully back from a digression (it is easy to turn into one),-is the pas qui coute. point was neglected.

It was, as I said before, a moonlight night, and Job and myself having, like Sir Fabian, "no mind to sleep," followed the fashion and the rest of the company at the inn, and strolled down to see the Falls by moonlight. I had been there before, and I took Job straight to the spot in the bed of the river which I have described above as my favourite,

* The Ionic philosophy, supported by Thales,