"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."" [Illustration] 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. "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.