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TRENTON FALLS.

BY THE REV. ABEL STEVENS.

TRENTON FALLS are in the town of Trenton, about fifteen miles in a northern direction from the city of Utica. It may seem an extravagant enthusiasm to undertake a ride of thirty miles, and that a digression from the regular route, for the purpose of seeing a single object; but no one endowed with even an ordinary love of nature will feel unrecompensed by a visit to these beautiful cascades. We started about nine o'clock in the morning on horseback. After passing through the village of Trenton, you immediately ascend a small hill, on the summit of which is a finely situated hotel, where you dismount and prepare to descend to the stream which forms the cascades.

The rivulet is called the West Canada Creek. The falls are about twenty-four miles above its confluence with the Mohawk river; they extend about two miles, and are six in number. A ridge of limestone, reaching from the Mohawk to the St. Lawrence, crosses the bed of the river through an interval of about five miles, and it is by the tortuous channel which it has worn for itself through this ridge, with

the numerous precipices which its waters have been excavating for ages, that an assemblage of natural features has been produced which forms a picture unrivalled for beauty, at least in our own country.

You descend from the hotel, on the summit of the hill, a precipitous declivity, by numerous flights of steps, to the river which lies entirely concealed with overhanging forests, and is not perceptible until you step into the very ravine through which it meanders. On reaching this position, your progress is instantly arrested to gaze with wonder and delight on the scenery, beautiful beyond description, which immediately opens to your view. Above, lofty and almost perpendicular hills lift their summits upward of 100 feet, robed with thick forests until within about twenty feet of their base, where the limestone is exposed in perfect stratification, worn into a thousand varied lines of beauty, by the waters which no doubt, formerly washed them. Below, the strata extend out beneath your feet making a level pathway sufficiently wide, with the exception of occasional places where it is contracted to a few inches, and frequently projecting so far as to form large table rocks. These continued strata break nearly in their centre, affording a channel of varying width for the stream, which whirls along with great

rapidity, its waters clear as crystal, now flowing smoothly like the surface of a mirror reflecting the small strip of sky perceptible above the tops of the hills and the foliage on their declivities, and then foaming over the reefs that interrupt their course, now, sweeping rapid as a lightning streak through deep chutes which they have cut for themselves, and then winding a serpentine course, in rolling eddies until they lose themselves in the distance. Now, suppose an assemblage of scenery a thousand times more delightful than this attempted description, extending for about two miles, with, at suitable intervals, six splendid cataracts tumbling over romantic precipices varying from twenty to forty-eight feet in depth, with lofty embankments, in many places projecting in threatening cliffs, under which you tremble with apprehension, and here and there large numbers of forest trees growing horizontally in their fissures, and pending over the winding waters as if charmed by their beauties, or stooping to imbibe their refreshing spray. Imagine such a scene as this fenced in by mountains from all around, accessible to the spectator only by few and somewhat difficult passages, every object shut out from the sight but the heavens above and the scenery below, where the mind can commune only with beauty and soli

tude and then you may have some conception of this loveliest workmanship of nature. The pros

pect from any one position is of but small extent, owing to the curvatures which the stream describes among the hills. This only adds to the interest of the scenery by dividing it into a succession of pictures, each perfect in itself, and sufficiently distinguished. You may well suppose that such an interesting scene detained me the great proportion of the day, gazing and gazing again, wandering to and fro, ascending the cliffs, leaping out on the isolated rocks that lay in the channel of the stream, venturing to perilous extremities of the banks, in order to blend the feeling of the terrible with the delightful, and varying my position as much as possible, that I might catch the full expression of the scene. Never, indeed did the true idea of the beautiful more entirely penetrate my soul. I rambled along the declivities of the embankments as far as it was possible without being precipitated into the depths, sometimes standing on small protuberances not more than four inches in width, and holding on to the cliffs above, while 20 or 30 feet below, the torrent was dashing onward in its course, as a cataract sending up its thundering roar. The whole mass of limestone forming the bed and banks of the river, is

full of various organic remains, some rare and valuable; indeed they seem to form the substance of the rock, for scarcely can a square inch beneath your feet be found destitute of some impression of organic existence, which in an unknown period of the past found a place of being where now rest the deep foundations of a part of an extended chasm of mountains. Thus while the whole scenery of the place renders it a beautiful and befitting temple of nature to her God, the rocky laminæ of the mountain are a record of great truths confirmatory of most important events in the providence of God, and in the narrative of his word-truths, recorded in hieroglyphics, which, after the obscurity of ages, modern science has deciphered with an accuracy almost infallible, and developed in them attestations of God's Holy Word. It may well be supposed that the Christian visitor, wandering alone amid these glorious solitudes, would catch the spirit of the scene, and, bowing on these entablatures of nature's ancient records, amid the entrancing beauty around him, send up his voice with the thunder of the cataract to Him who is God over all and blessed forever.