whatever may be their name in Indian vocabulary, they have no good
reason for complaint; inasmuch as Nature, in marking and scooping out
the channel of their stream, seems to have had an eye to the useful
rather than the picturesque. After a few preliminary antics and
youthful vagaries up among the White Hills, the Merrimac comes down to
the seaboard, a clear, cheerful, hard-working Yankee river. Its
numerous falls and rapids are such as seem to invite the engineer's
level rather than the pencil of the tourist; and the mason who piles up
the huge brick fabrics at their feet is seldom, I suspect, troubled with
sentimental remorse or poetical misgivings. Staid and matter of fact as
the Merrimac is, it has, nevertheless, certain capricious and eccentric
tributaries; the Powow, for instance, with its eighty feet fall in a few
rods, and that wild, Indian-haunted Spicket, taking its wellnigh
perpendicular leap of thirty feet, within sight of the village meeting-
house, kicking up its Pagan heels, Sundays and all, in sheer contempt of
Puritan tithing-men. This latter waterfall is now somewhat modified by
the hand of Art, but is still, as Professor Hitchcock's "Scenographical
Geology" says of it, "an object of no little interest." My friend T.,
favorably known as the translator of "Undine" and as a writer of fine
and delicate imagination, visited Spicket Falls before the sound of a
hammer or the click of a trowel had been heard beside them. His journal
of "A Day on the Merrimac" gives a pleasing and vivid description of
their original appearance as viewed through the telescope of a poetic
fancy. The readers of "Undine" will thank me for a passage or two from
this sketch:--

"The sound of the waters swells more deeply. Something supernatural in
their confused murmur; it makes me better understand and sympathize with
the writer of the Apocalypse when he speaks of the voice of many waters,
heaping image upon image, to impart the vigor of his conception.

"Through yonder elm-branches I catch a few snowy glimpses of foam in the
air. See that spray and vapor rolling up the evergreen on my left The
two side precipices, one hundred feet apart and excluding objects of
inferior moment, darken and concentrate the view. The waters between
pour over the right-hand and left-hand summit, rushing down and uniting
among the craggiest and abruptest of rocks. Oh for a whole mountain-
side of that living foam! The sun impresses a fain