, Niagara Falls 



1871 into finest powder, and hence arises a huge mist-column, and fills 

 the upper air with its hovering drift. Its summit far overtops 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 ensign 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 turn of the horizontal to the per- 

 pendicular? To call it simple seems a florid over-statement. 

 Anything less combined and complicated never appealed to the 

 admiration of men. It is carved clean 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 a thousand thunderbolts; and yet its pure outline never 

 lapses by a bubble's value from its constant calm. It is as gentle 

 as the pouring of wine from a flagon — of melody from the lip 

 of a singer. From the little grove beside the American Fall you 

 catch superbly — better than you are able to do at the Horse- 

 shoe — the very profile of this full-flooded bend. If the line of 

 beauty had vanished from the earth elsewhere, it would survive 

 on this classic forehead. It is impossible to insist too strongly on 

 the prodigious elegance of the great Fall, as seen from the Canada 

 cliff. You fancy that the genius who contrived it was verily the 

 prime author of the truth that order, measure, and symmetry are 

 the conditions of perfect beauty. He applied his faith among 

 the watching and listening forests, long before the Greeks pro- 

 claimed theirs in the shining masonry of the Acropolis. Rage, 

 confusion, chaos, are grandly absent; dignity, grace, and leisure 

 ride upon the crest; it flows without haste, without rest, with the 

 measured majesty of a motion whose rhythm is attuned to 

 eternity. 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 falling flood and rising cloud you imagine a 

 mystical meaning — the passage of body to soul, of matter to 

 spirit, of human to divine. 



1104 



