Niagara Falls 



1871 account this sort of familiarity a misfortune. The surprise is 



Howdls none the less a surprise because it is kept till the last, and the 

 marvel, making itself finally felt in every nerve, and not at once 

 through a single sense, all the more fully possesses you. It is as 

 if Niagara reserved her magnificence, and preferred to win your 

 heart with her beauty; and so Isabel, who was instinctively pre- 

 pared for the reverse, suffered a vague disappointment, for a little 

 instant, as she looked along the verge from the water that 

 caressed the shore at her feet before it flung itself down, to the 

 wooded point that divides the American from the Canadian Fall, 

 beyond which showed dimly through its veil of golden and 

 silver mists the emerald wall of the great Horse-Shoe. "How still 

 it is ! " she said, amidst the roar that shook the ground under their 

 feet and made the leaves tremble overhead, and " How lone- 

 some ! " amidst the people lounging and sauntering about in every 

 direction among the trees. In fact that prodigious presence does 

 make a solitude and silence round every spirit worthy to perceive 

 it, and it gives a kind of dignity to all its belongings, so that the 

 rocks and pebbles in the water's edge, and the weeds and grasses 

 that nod above it, have a value far beyond that of such common 

 things elsewhere. In all the aspects of Niagara there seems a 

 grave simplicity, which is perhaps a reflection of the spectator's 

 soul for once utterly dismantled of affectation and convention. 

 In the vulgar reaction from this, you are of course as trivial, if you 

 like, at Niagara, as anywhere. 



• • • • • 



. . . Emerging into the light again, she found herself at the 

 foot of the fall by whose top she had just stood. 



At first she was glad there were other people down there, as 

 if she and Basil were not enough to bear it alone, and she could 

 almost have spoken to the two hopelessly pretty brides, with 

 parasols and impertinent little boots, whom their attendant 

 husbands were helping over the sharp and slippery rocks, so bare 

 beyond the spray, so green and mossy with the fall of mist. But 

 in another breath she forgot them, as she looked on that dizzied 



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