Preservation of the Falls 



from the lip of a singer. From the little grove beside the Ameri- 1871 

 can Fall you catch this extraordinary profile better than you are ** mc * 

 able to do at the Horseshoe. If the line of beauty had vanished 

 from the earth elsewhere, it would survive on the brow of 

 Niagara. It is impossible to insist too strongly on the grace of the 

 thing, as seen from the Canada cliff. The genius who invented it 

 was certainly the first author of the idea that order, proportion 

 and symmetry are the conditions of perfect beauty. He applied 

 his faith among the watching and listening forests, long before 

 the Greeks proclaimed theirs in the measurements of the 

 Parthenon. Even the roll of the white batteries at the base seems 

 fixed and poised and ordered, and in the vague middle zone of 

 difference between the flood as it falls and the mist as it rises you 

 imagine a mystical meaning — the passage of body to soul, of 

 matter to spirit, of human to divine. 



Goat Island, of which every one has heard, is the menagerie of 

 lions, and the spot where your single stone — or, in plain prose, 

 your half-dollar — kills most birds. This broad insular strip, 

 which performs the excellent office of withholding the American 

 shore from immediate contact with the flood, has been left very 

 much to itself, and here you may ramble, for the most part, in 

 undiverted contemplation. The island is owned, I believe, by a 

 family of co-heirs, who have the good taste to keep it quiet. 

 More than once, however, as I have been told, they have been 

 offered a " big price " for the privilege of building an hotel upon 

 this sacred soil. They have been wise, but, after all, they are 

 human, and the offer may be made once too often. Before this 

 fatal day dawns, why should not the State buy up the precious 

 acres, as California has done the Yo-Semite? It is the opinion 

 of a sentimental tourist that no price would be too great to pay. 

 Otherwise, the only hope for their integrity is in the possibility of 

 a shrewd provision on the part of the gentlemen who know how to 

 keep hotels that the music of the dinner-band would be injured by 

 the roar of the cataract. You approach from Goat Island the 

 left abutment of the Horseshoe. The little tower which, with the 



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