f
gleaming water, a narrow strip of tow-path keeping it company,
buttressed in from the surrounding fields with thickets of every species
of bush and luxurious undergrowth, and starred with every summer flower.

Presently, by the side of the path, one comes to an object which seems
romantically in keeping with the general character of the scene--a long
block of stone, lying among the grasses and the wild geraniums, on
which, as one nears it, one descries carved scroll-work and quaint,
deep-cut lettering. Is it the tomb of dead lovers, the memorial of some
great deed, or an altar to the _genius loci_? The willows whisper about
it, and the great elms and maples sway and murmur no less impressively
than if the inscription were in Latin of two thousand years ago. Nor is
it in me to regret that the stone and its inscription, instead of
celebrating the rural Pan, commemorate the men to whom I owe this lane
of dreaming water and all its marginal green solitude: to wit--the
"MORRIS CANAL AND BANKING CO., A.D. 1829," represented by its
president, its cashier, its canal commissioner, and a score of other
names of directors, engineers, and builders. Peace, therefore, to the
souls of those dead directors, who, having only in mind their banking
and engineering project, yet unconsciously wrought, nearly a century
ago, so poetic a thing, and may their rest be lulled by such leafy
murmurs and swaying of tendrilled shadows as all the day through stir
and sway along the old canal!

A few yards beyond this monumental stone, there comes a great opening in
the sky, a sense of depth and height and spacious freshness in the air,
such as we feel on approaching the gorge of a great river; and in fact
the canal has arrived at the Passaic and is about to be carried across
it in a sort of long, wooden trough, supported by a noble bridge that
might well pass for a genuine antique, owing to that collaborating hand
of Nature which has filled the interstices of its massive masonry with
fern, and so loosened it here and there that some of the canal escapes
in long, ribbon-like cascades into the rocky bed of the river below. An
aqueduct has always seemed to me, though it would be hard to say why, a
most romantic thing. The idea of carrying running water across a bridge
in this way--water which it is so hard to think of as imprisoned or
controlled, and which, too, however shallow, one always associates with
mysterious depth--the idea of thus carrying it