"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.