Niagara Falls 



classic rainbow, figures in all " views " of the scene, is planted at 

 a dozen feet from the shore, directly on the shoulder of the Fall. 

 This little tower, I think, deserves a compliment. One might 

 have said beforehand that it would never do, but, as it stands, it 

 makes rather a good point. It serves as a unit of appreciation of 

 the scale of things, and from its spray-blackened summit it admits 

 you to an almost downward peep into the green gulf. More here, 

 even, than on the Canada shore, you perceive the unlimited 

 ivateriness of the whole spectacle. Its liquid masses take on at 

 moments the likeness of walls and pillars and columns, and, to 

 present any vivid picture of them, we are compelled to talk freely 

 of emerald and crystal, of silver and marble. But really, all the 

 simplicity of the Falls, and half their grandeur, reside in their 

 unmitigated fluidity, which excludes all rocky staging and earthy 

 commixture. It is water piled on water, pinned on water, hinging 

 and hanging on water, breaking, crashing, whitening in shocks 

 altogether watery. And yet for all this no solid was ever so solid 

 as that sculptured shoulder of the Horseshoe. From this little 

 tower, or, better still, from various points farther along the island- 

 shore, even to look is to be immersed. Before you stretches the 

 huge expanse of the upper river, with its belittled cliffs, now mere 

 black lines of forest, dull as with the sadness of gazing at per- 

 petual trouble, eternal danger. Anything more horribly desolate 

 than this boundless livid welter of the rapids it is impossible to 

 conceive, and you very soon begin to pay it the tribute of your 

 own suddenly-assumed suspense, in the impulse to people it 

 with human forms. On this theme you can work out endless 

 analogies. Yes, they are alive, every fear-blanched billow and 

 eddy of them — alive and frenzied with the sense of their doom. 

 They see below them that nameless pause of the arrested current, 

 and the high-tossed drift of sound and spray which rises up 

 lamenting, like the ghosts of their brothers who have been dashed 

 to pieces. They shriek, they sob, they clasp their white hands 

 and toss their long hair; they cling and clutch and wrestle, and 

 above all, they appear to bite. Especially tragical is the air they 



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