The most interesting exhibition open when I was there was, decidedly, Colonel Trumbold’s; and how the patriots of America can permit this truly national collection to remain a profitless burden on the hands of the artist, it is difficult to understand.  Many of the sketches are masterly; but like his illustrious countryman, West, his sketches are his chef d’oeuvres.

I can imagine nothing more perfect than the interior of the public institutions of New York.  There is a practical good sense in all their arrangements that must strike foreigners very forcibly.  The Asylum for the Destitute offers a hint worth taking.  It is dedicated to the reformation of youthful offenders of both sexes, and it is as admirable in the details of its management, as in its object.  Every part of the institution is deeply interesting; but there is a difference very remarkable between the boys and the girls.  The boys are, I think, the finest set of lads I ever saw brought together; bright looking, gay, active, and full of intelligence.  The girls are exactly in reverse; heavy, listless, indifferent, and melancholy.  In conversing with the gentleman who is the general superintendant of the establishment, I made the remark to him, and he told me, that the reality corresponded with the appearance.  All of them had been detected in some act of dishonesty; but the boys, when removed from the evil influence which had led them so to use their ingenuity, rose like a spring when a pressure is withdrawn; and feeling themselves once more safe from danger and from shame, hope and cheerfulness animated every countenance.  But the pour girls, on the contrary, can hardly look up again.  They are as different as an oak and a lily after a storm.  The one, when the fresh breeze blows over it, shakes the raindrops from its crest, and only looks the brighter; the other, its silken leaves once soiled, shrinks from the eye, and is levelled to the earth for ever.

We spent a delightful day in New Jersey, in visiting, with a most agreeable party, the inclined planes, which are used instead of locks on the Morris canal.

This is a very interesting work; it is one among a thousand which prove the people of America to be the most enterprising in the world.  I was informed that this important canal, which connects the waters of the Hudson and the Delaware, is a hundred miles long, and in this distance overcomes a variation of level amounting to sixteen hundred feet.  Of this, fourteen hundred are achieved by inclined planes.  The planes average about sixty feet of perpendicular lift each, and are to support about forty tons.  The time consumed in passing them is twelve minutes for one hundred feet of perpendicular rise.  The expense is less than a third of what locks would be for surmounting the same rise.  If we set about any more canals, this may be worth attending to.

This Morris canal is certainly an extraordinary work; it not only varies its level sixteen hundred feet, but at one point runs along the side of a mountain at thirty feet above the tops of the highest buildings in the town of Paterson, below; at another it crosses the falls of the Passaic in a stone aqueduct sixty feet above the water in the river.  This noble work, in a great degree, owes its existence to the patriotic and scientific energy of Mr. Cadwallader Colden.