Travelers' Original Accounts: 1801-1840 



had my mind been in such perfect unison with the scene. There 1834 

 were intervals, when I was conscious of nothing but the great awt ome 

 river, rolling calmly into the abyss, rather descending than pre- 

 cipitating itself, and acquiring tenfold majesty from its unhurried 

 motion. It came like the march of Destiny. It was not taken 

 by surprise, but seemed to have anticipated, in all its course 

 through the broad lakes, that it must pour their collected waters 

 down this height. The perfect foam of the river, after its descent, 

 and the ever-varying shapes of mist, rising up, to become clouds 

 in the sky, would be the very picture of confusion, were it merely 

 transient, like the rage of a tempest. But when the beholder 

 has stood awhile, and perceives no lull in the storm, and con- 

 siders that the vapor and the foam are as everlasting as the rocks 

 which produce them, all this turmoil assumes a sort of calmness. 

 It soothes, while it awes the mind. 



Leaning over the cliff, I saw the guide conducting two adven- 

 turers behind the falls. It was pleasant, from that high seat in 

 the sunshine, to observe them struggling against the eternal storm 

 of the lower regions, with heads bent down, now faltering, now 

 pressing forward, and finally swallowed up in their victory. 

 After their disappearance, a blast rushed out with an old hat, 

 which it had swept from one of their heads. The rock, to which 

 they were directing their unseen course, is marked, at a fearful 

 distance on the exterior of the sheet, by a jet of foam. The 

 attempt to reach it appears both poetical and perilous to a 

 looker-on, but may be accomplished without much more diffi- 

 culty or hazard, than in stemming a violent north-easter. In a 

 few moments, forth came the children of the mist. Dripping 

 and breathless, they crept along the base of the cliff, ascended 

 to the guide's cottage, and received, I presume, a certificate of 

 their achievement, with three verses of sublime poetry on the 

 back. 



My contemplations were often interrupted by strangers who 

 came down from Forsyth's to take their first view of the falls. 

 A short, ruddy, middle-aged gentleman, fresh from Old England, 

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