Niagara Falls 



1871 The main feature, perhaps, is the incomparable loveliness of the 



James immense line of the shelf and its lateral abutments. It neither 



falters, nor breaks nor stiffens, but maintains from wing to wing 

 the lightness of its semicircle. This perfect curve melts into the 

 sheet that seems at once to drop from it and sustain it. The 

 famous green loses nothing, as you may imagine, on a nearer view. 

 A green more vividly cool and pure it is impossible to conceive. 

 It is to the vulgar greens of earth what the blue of a summer sky 

 is to artificial dyes, and is, in fact, as sacred, as remote, as impalp- 

 able as that. You can fancy it the parent-green, the head-spring 

 of colour to all the verdant water-caves and all the clear, sub- 

 fluvial haunts and bowers of naiads and mermen in all the streams 

 of the earth. The lower half of the watery wall is shrouded in 

 the steam of the boiling gulf — a veil never rent nor lifted. At 

 its heart this eternal cloud seems fixed and still with excess of 

 motion — still and intensely white ; but, as it rolls and climbs 

 against its lucent cliff, it tosses little whiffs and fumes and pants 

 of snowy smoke, which betray the convulsions we never behold. 

 In the middle of the curve, the depth of the recess, the converging 

 walls are ground into a dust of foam, which rises in a tall column, 

 and fills the upper air with its hovering drift. Its summit far over- 

 tops the crest of the cataract, and, as you look down along the 

 rapids above, you see it hanging over the averted gulf like some 

 far-flowing signal of danger. Of these things some vulgar verbal 

 hint may be attempted; but what words can render the rarest 

 charm of all — the clear-cut brow of the Fall, the very act and 

 figure of the leap, the rounded passage of the horizontal to the 

 perpendicular? To say it is simple is to make a phrase about it. 

 Nothing was ever more successfully executed. It is carved as 

 sharp as an emerald, as one must say and say again. It arrives, 

 it pauses, it plunges ; it comes and goes for ever ; it melts and shifts 

 and changes, all with the sound as of millions of bass-voices ; and 

 yet its outline never varies, never moves with a different pulse. It 

 is as gentle as the pouring of wine from a flagon — of melody 



1098 



