Travelers' Original Accounts Since 1840 



One always experiences a vivid emotion from the i860 

 sight of the Rapids, no matter how often one sees them, but I am owe * 

 sale in saying that one sees them for the first time but once. 

 After that one has the feeling of a habitue towards them, a sort 

 of friendly and familiar appreciation of their terrific beauty, but 

 certainly not the thrill of the pristine awe. It is even hard to 

 recall that: the picture remains, but not the sense of their mighty 

 march, or of their gigantic leaps and lunges, when they break 

 ranks, and their procession becomes a mere onward tumult with- 

 out form or order. I had schooled myself for great impressions, 

 and I did not mean to lose one of them; they were all going into 

 that correspondence which I was so proud to be writing, and 

 finally, I hoped, they were going into literature: poems, sketches, 

 studies, and I do not know what all. But I had not counted upon 

 the Rapids taking me by the throat, as it were, and making my 

 heart stop. I still think that above and below the Falls, the 

 Rapids are the most striking features of the spectacle. At least 

 you may say something about them, compare them to something ; 

 when you come to the Cataract itself, you can say nothing; it is 

 incomparable. My sense of it first, and my sense of it last, 

 was not a sense of the stupendous, but a sense of beauty, of 

 serenity, of repose. I have always had to take myself in hand, 

 to shake myself up, to look twice, and to recur to what I have 

 heard and read of other people's impressions, before I am over- 

 powered by it. Otherwise I am simply charmed. 



I hurried out to look at it, and I spent the afternoon in taking 

 a careful account of my impressions, and trying to fit phrases to 

 my emotions for that blessed correspondence. Then I went back 

 to my room and began to put them down on paper while they 

 were still warm. 



That pleasant room in the hotel is very vivid in my memory 

 yet. It had a green lattice-door opening into the corridor, and 

 when I left the inner door ajar, a delicious current of summer 

 breeze and afternoon sunshine drew through it from the window 

 looking out on a sweep of those Rapids. It was what they call 



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