Travelers' Original Accounts: 1 801 -1 840 



not altogether to be compared to the Canadian shore for pic- 1836 

 turesque scenery. The Americans have disfigured their share of Jameson 

 the rapids with mills and manufactories, and horrid red brick 

 houses, and other unacceptable, unseasonable sights and signs of 

 sordid industry. Worse than all is the round tower, which some 

 profane wretch has erected on the Crescent Fall; it stands there 

 so detestably impudent and mal-h-propos — it is such a signal 

 yet puny monument of bad taste — so miserably mesquin, and so 

 presumptuous, that I do hope the violated majesty of nature will 

 take the matter in hand, and overwhelm or cast it down the 

 precipice one of these fine days, though indeed a barrel of gun- 

 powder were a shorter if not a surer method. . . . 



The people who have spoken or written of these Falls of 

 Niagara, have surely never done justice to their loveliness, their 

 inexpressible, inconceivable beauty. The feeling of their beauty 

 has become with me a deeper feeling than that of their sublimity. 

 What a scene this evening! What splendor of color! The 

 emerald and chrysopaz of the transparent waters, the dazzling 

 gleam of the foam, and the snow-white vapor on which was 

 displayed the most perfect and gigantic iris I ever beheld — 

 forming not a half, but at least two-thirds of an entire circle, 

 one extremity resting on the lesser (or American) Fall, the other 

 in the very lap of the Crescent Fall, spanning perhaps half a 

 mile, perfectly resplendent in hue — so gorgeous, so vivid, and 

 yet so ethereally delicate, and apparently within a few feet of 

 the eye; the vapors rising into the blue heavens at least four 

 hundred feet, three times the height of the Falls, and tinted rose 

 and amber with the evening sun; and over the woods around 

 every possible variety of the richest foliage — no, nothing was 

 ever so transcendently lovely! The effect, too, was so grandly 

 uniform in its eternal sound and movement, it was quite different 

 from those wild, impatient, tumultuous rapids. It soothed, it 

 melted, it composed, rather than excited. 



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