"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.
"The usual walk (through this deep cave open at the top) is about half a mile in length, and its almost subterranean river, in that distance, plunges over four precipices in exceedingly beautiful cascades. On the successive rocky terraces between the falls, the torrent takes every variety of rapids and whirlpools, and, perhaps, in all the scenery of the world, there is no river, which, in the same space, presents so many of the various shapes and beauties of running and falling water. The Indian name of the stream (the Kanata, which means the _amber river_) expresses one of its peculiarities, and, probably from the depth of shade cast by the two dark and overhanging walls 'twixt which it flows, the water is everywhere of a peculiarly rich lustre and color, and, in the edges of one or two of the cascades, as yellow as gold. Artists, in drawing this river, fail, somehow, in giving the impression of _deep-down-itude_ which is produced by the close approach of the two lofty walls of rock, capped by the overleaning woods, and with the sky apparently resting, like a ceiling, upon the leafy architraves.... If there were truly, as the poets say figuratively, "worlds _within_ worlds," this would look as if an earthquake had cracked open the outer globe, and exposed, through the yawning fissure, one of the rivers of the globe below--the usual underground level of "down among the dead men," being, as you walk upon its banks, between you and the daylight.