Niagara Falls 



1836 and frets like the breakers of the ocean. Huge mounds of water, 

 Jameson smooth, transparent, and gleaming like the emerald, or rather 

 like the more delicate hue of the chrysopaz, rise up and bound 

 over some unseen impediment, then break into silver foam, which 

 leaps into the air in the most graceful fantastic forms; and so it 

 rushes on, whirling, boiling, dancing, sparkling along, with a 

 playful impatience, rather than overwhelming fury, rejoicing as 

 if escaped from bondage, rather than raging in angry might — 

 wildly, magnificently beautiful ! The idea, too, of the immediate 

 danger, the consciousness that any thing caught within its verge is 

 inevitably hurried to a swift destination, swallowed up, annihi- 

 lated, thrills the blood; the immensity of the picture, spreading a 

 mile at least each way, and framed in by the interminable forests, 

 adds to the feeling of grandeur: while the giddy, infinite motion 

 of the headlong waters, dancing and leaping, and revelling and 

 roaring, in their mad glee, gave me a sensation of rapturous terror, 

 and at last caused a tension of the nerves in my head, which 

 obliged me to turn away. 



The great ocean, when thus agitated by conflicting winds or 

 opposing rocks, is a more tremendous thing, but it is merely 

 tremendous — it makes us think of our prayers; whereas, while 

 I was looking on these rapids, beauty and terror, power and 

 joy, were blended, and so thoroughly, that even while I trembled 

 and admired, I could have burst into a wild laugh, and joined 

 the dancing billows in their glorious, fearful mirth — 

 Leaping like Bacchanals from rock to rock, 

 Flinging the frantic Thyrsus wild and high! 



I shall never see again, or feel again, aught like it — never! 

 I did not think there was an object in nature, animate or inani- 

 mate, that could thus overset me now! 



Accompanied the family of Colonel Delatre to the American 

 side, and dined on Goat Island. Though the various views of 

 the two cataracts be here wonderfully grand and beautiful, and 

 the bridge across the rapids a sort of miracle, as they say, still it is 



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