University of Virginia Library

3. 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 green-sward.

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 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 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 everything 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 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: —

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,
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.”[4]