Music — Poetry — Fiction 



sea, hurling itself from the high summit in huge white knots, and 1871 

 breaks and masses, and plunging into the gulf beside her, while Howells 

 it sent continually up a strong voice of lamentation, and crawled 

 away in vast eddies, with somehow a look of human terror, 

 bewilderment and pain. It was bathed in snowy vapor to its 

 crest, but now and then heavy currents of air drew this aside, and 

 they saw the outline of the Falls almost as far as the Canada side. 

 They remembered afterwards how they were able to make use 

 of but one sense at a time, and how when they strove to take in 

 the forms of the descending flood, they ceased to hear it; but as 

 soon as they released their eyes from this service, every fibre in 

 them vibrated to the sound, and the spectacle dissolved away in 

 it. They were aware, too, of a strange capriciousness in their 

 senses, and of a tendency of each to palter with the things per- 

 ceived. The eye could no longer take truthful note of quality, 

 and now beheld the tumbling deluge as a Gothic wall of carven 

 marble, white, motionless, and now as a fall of lightest snow, 

 with movement in all its atoms, and scarce so much cohesion as 

 would hold them together; and again they could not discern if 

 this course were from above or from beneath, whether the water 

 rose from the abyss or dropped from the height. The ear could 

 give the brain no assurance of the sound that filled it, and 

 whether it were great or little; the prevailing softness of the 

 cataract's tone seemed so much opposed to ideas of prodigious 

 force or of prodigious volume. It was only when the sight, so 

 idle in its own behalf, came to the aid of the other sense, and 

 showed them the mute movement of each other's lips, that they 

 dimly appreciated the depth of sound that involved them. . . . 

 Over the river, so still with its oily eddies and delicate wreaths 

 of foam, just below the Falls they have in late years woven a web 

 of wire high in air and hung a bridge from precipice to precipice. 

 Of all the bridges made with hands it seems the lightest, most 

 ethereal; it is ideally graceful, and droops from its slight towers 

 like a garland. It is worthy to command, as it does, the whole 

 grandeur of Niagara, and to show the traveller the vast spectacle, 



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