"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....