Maps and Pictures 



your admiration; and art is true to its sympathy with nature, 1857 

 when, as I said, it almost scorns your approval. A rose is beauti- Church 

 ful for its own beauty, not for our praise ; and this picture makes 

 no points, has no rhetoric, and takes no postures; but challenges 

 your homage as Sabrina fair challenges it, under the glassy wave, 

 or as the water's own transparency compels it. 



[Church's Niagara.] (Lit. liv. age, Oct. 24, 1857. 55:254-255. 1857 



. . But Mr. Church has painted the stupendous cataract 

 with a quiet courage and a patient elaboration, which leaves us, 

 for the first time, satisfied that even this awful reality is not 

 beyond the range of human imitation. 



Mr. Church's picture is an oblong of some seven or eight feet 

 by three and a half, if our eyes have not deceived us. The view 

 is taken from the Canadian side, a little above Table Rock, and 

 it includes the whole sweep of the Horseshoe Fall, to the corner 

 of Goat Island. There is no foreground or shore. The spectator 

 looks right along the Canadian rapids, as their swirls converge for 

 the tremendous leap. A shattered tree trunk is caught in the 

 opposing eddies, which churn and chafe into foam over the layers 

 of brown rock, the sunlight striking their edges into transparent 

 green where they fling themselves over the lips of the ledges, in 

 their hurrying course to the plunge of the mighty river. About the 

 center of the picture the bend of the barrier enables us to watch 

 the downward leap of the river, not in a sheet, but in innumerable 

 cascades from every projecting point, shivered into fine fringes of 

 foam, and losing themselves in the spray to which the mass of 

 water is churned by its fall. Across the wet air of this spray cloud 

 the rainbow flings its prismatic arch. Beyond we see the distant 

 lines of foam that mark the rapids, and further still the terraces 

 of the Chippeway shore flushed with the rich hues of American 

 Autumnal forest. The time is towards evening. ... It 

 bears throughout unmistakable evidence of the most close and suc- 

 cessful study. To paint running water is always difficult. But 

 when the running water is the expanse of a mighty river, broken 

 into countless eddies by rock ledges, and hurrying to such a fall, 



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