"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 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. 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 inclosing 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,"