Travelers Original Accounts Since 1840 



WHITE, John. Sketches from America. Lond. : Sampson Low, 1859 

 Son, and Marston. 1870. Pp. 187-199. White 



Of descriptions and views of the Falls most people 

 are fairly weary, and are ready to recoil at the very sight of 

 the familiar names " Terrapin Tower," and " Goat Island," 

 " Horseshoe Falls," and " Table Rock." This sketch will try 

 to avoid enlarging upon well-known points of topography, and to 

 dwell rather on the personal impressions of a visitor; which can, 

 perhaps, hardly help having some individuality of their own. 



A feeling common among new-comers to the place 



— you may hear of it, and may read of it, and are sure to feel 

 something of it yourself — is, that the thing cannot possibly last; 

 the pace is too furious for that; at this rate, all the floods of 

 Erie, and of those yet vaster lakes in the West, must assuredly 

 have run off before morning; you must get up very early if you 

 would be in time for another sight. It certainly needs some 

 reflection to convince you, that there has not been some extra 

 water turned on for your special behoof, and as a mere tem- 

 porary arrangement. That, throughout some four hundred cen- 

 turies, this same thunder has been filling the woods, this same 

 trembling has shaken the earth, the same volumes of water have 

 kept plunging downward, day and night, and winter and summer, 

 is no mere Tupperian reflection at this place but the most stag- 

 gering reflection of all. The mere age of other grand objects 



— of mountains, and oceans, and deserts — has nothing in it so 

 oppressive; for they have lain at rest, or, at least, have known 

 what rest is; but that this wild cataract, the world's most terrible 

 activity, should have gone struggling on in its sleepless agony 

 for such a very eternity of ages, is the most overpowering idea 

 that Niagara can call up before you. But, by the morning, you 

 have got pretty well used to the roar and to the trembling of 

 the ground. Then, too, with the daylight comes minute inspec- 

 tion — comes the destruction of the ideal with the knowledge of 

 the real — comes the death of poetry and the birth of criticism — 



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