Travelers' Original Accounts Since 1840 



The helplessness of its frenzied sweep saddens your heart. It J 851 

 is dark, fateful, foreboding. At times, as if a wild despair had 

 seized it and rent it, it seethes, and struggles, and dashes foam- 

 like into the air. Not with kindred passion do you regard it, 

 but sadly, with folded hands of resignation, as you watch the 

 death struggles of a hero. It sweeps away as you look, dark, 

 and cold, and curling, and the seething you saw, before your 

 thought is shaped, is an eddy of foam in the Niagara River 

 below. 



As yet you have not seen the Fall. You are coming with its 

 waters, and are at its level. But groups of persons, sitting upon 

 yonder point, which we see through the trees, are looking at the 

 Cataract. We do not pause for them; we run now, down the 

 path, along the bridges, into the Tower, and lean far over where 

 the spray cools our faces. The living water of the rapids moves 

 to its fall, as if torpid with terror; and the river that we saw, in 

 one vast volume now pours over the parapet, and makes Niagara. 

 It is not all stricken into foam as it falls, but the densest mass is 

 smooth, and almost of livid green. 



Yet, even as it plunges, see how curls of spray exude from 

 the very substance of the mass, airy, sparkling and wreathing 

 into mist — emblems of the water's resurrection into summer 

 clouds. Looking over into the abyss, we behold nothing below, 

 we hear only a slow, constant thunder; and, bewildered in the 

 mist, dream that the Cataract has cloven the earth to its centre, and 

 that, pouring its waters into the fervent inner heat, they hiss into 

 spray, and overhang the fated Fall, the sweat of its agony. . . . 



Nature has her partialities for places as well as persons. . . . 

 Here at Niagara she enamels the cliffs with delicate verdure, and 

 the luminous gloom of the wood upon Goat Island invites to 

 meditation with cathedral solemnity. 



Nothing struck me more than the ease of access to the very 

 verge of the cataract. Upon the narrow point between the large 

 and small American falls you may sit upon the soft bank on a 

 tranquil afternoon, dabbling your feet in the swiftly slipping 



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