Music — Poetry — Fiction 



massive walls of sea rounding and sweeping into the gulf together, 1871 

 the color gone, and the smooth brink showing black and ridgy. owc 



But all troubles passed with the night, and the next morning 

 they spent a charming hour about Prospect Point, and in saunter- 

 ing over Goat Island, somewhat daintily tasting the flavors of the 

 place on whose wonders they had so hungrily and indiscriminately 

 feasted at first. They had already the feeling of veteran visitors, 

 and they loftily marveled at the greed with which newer-comers 

 plunged at the sensations. They could not conceive why people 

 should want to descend the inclined railway to the foot of the 

 American Fall; they smiled at the idea of going up Terrapin 

 Tower; they derided the vulgar daring of those who went out 

 upon the Three Weird Sisters; for some whom they saw about 

 to go down the Biddle Stairs to the Cave of the Winds, they had 

 no words to express their contempt. 



Then they made their excursion to the Whirlpool, mistakenly 

 going down on the American side, for it is much better seen from 

 the other, though seen from any point it is the most impressive 

 feature of the whole prodigious spectacle of Niagara. 



Here within the compass of a mile, those inland seas of the 

 North, Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and the multitude of 

 smaller lakes, all pour their floods, where they swirl in dreadful 

 vortices, with resistless under-currents boiling beneath the surface 

 of that mighty eddy. Abruptly from this scene of secret power, 

 so different from the thunderous splendors of the cataract itself, 

 rise lofty cliffs on every side, to a height of two hundred feet, 

 clothed from the water's edge almost to their crests with dark 

 cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your senses perceive, the lakes steal 

 out of the whirlpool, then, drunk and wild, with brawling rapids 

 roar away to Ontario through the narrow channel of the river. 

 Awful as the scene is, you stand so far above it that you do not 

 know the half of its terribleness ; for those waters that look so 

 smooth are great ridges and rings, forced, by the impulse of the 

 currents, twelve feet higher in the centre than at the margin. 



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