Niagara Falls 



1871 the fact that they are built clean of fluid elements, and that no 

 rocky staging or earthy commixture avail to complicate and vulgar- 

 ize them. They are water piled on water, pinned on water, hing- 

 ing and hanging on water, breaking, crashing, whitening in mutual 

 masses of water. And yet for all this no solid was ever solid like 

 that sculptured shoulder of the Horseshoe! From this little 

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

 shore, it seems indeed a watery world. 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 eternal 

 storm. 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 terror, in the impulse to 

 people it with human forms. On this theme you can spin endless 

 romances. 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 murdered brothers. They 

 shriek, they sob, they clasp their white hands and toss their long 

 hair; they cling and clutch and wrestle, and, above all, they bite. 

 Especially tragical is the air they have of being forced backward, 

 with averted faces, to their fate. Every portion of the flood is 

 like the grime stride of a giant, wading huge-kneed to his purpose, 

 with the white teeth of a victim fastened in his neck. The outer- 

 most of three small islands, inter-connected by short bridges, at 

 the extremity of this shore, places one in singularly intimate rela- 

 tion with this portentous flurry. To say that hereabouts the water 

 leaps and plunges and rears and dives, that its uproar deadens the 

 thunder, and its swiftness distances the lightning, is to say all that 

 we can, and yet but a tithe of what we should. Nowhere surely 

 in the wide world is water handled with such a masterly knowl- 

 edge of effect. 



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