Niagara Falls 



i860 a single room, but it seemed very spacious at that time, and it 

 had a little table in it, where I wrote my letters to the Cincinnati 

 paper. I lived two weeks in that room, and I made a vast 

 deal of copy, including some poems, I believe, which never got 

 printed, any more than most of my letters, though I did not con- 

 fine the test of their merit to one editor alone. 



Apart from these literary enterprises of mine there was not a 

 great deal to occupy me in the hotel. I suppose there are 

 moments when the hotels at Niagara are full, but I never hap- 

 pened there at those moments, and my hotel at the time of the 

 first visit was far from crowded, though it was in the days before 

 the war when Southerners were reputed to visit the Falls in great 

 numbers. We dined at midday to the music of a brass band, 

 which must have been more than usually brazen, to have affected 

 my nerves the way it did, for at twenty-three the nerves are not 

 sensitive. Very likely there were a variety of brides and grooms 

 there, but I did not know them from the rest: so little is one 

 condition of life able to distinguish another. There was a period 

 when these young couples were visible to me, afterwards; and 

 then, when I was very much older, they vanished again, and 

 were no more to be found by the eye of earlier age than by the 

 eye of earlier youth. I believe I saw numbers of pretty young 

 girls, who then appeared to me stately and mature women, of 

 great splendor and beauty, and of varying measures of haughty 

 inapproachability. I made the acquaintance of no one in the 

 hotel, but by a sort of amnition, which I should now be at a loss 

 to account for, I fell in with two artists who were painting the 

 Falls and the Rapids, and the scenery generally, and I used to go 

 about with them, and watch them at their work. They were 

 brothers, and very friendly fellows, not much older than I, and 

 because I liked them, and was reaching out in every direction for 

 the materials of greater and greater consciousness, I tried to see 

 Niagara as actively and pervasively iridescent as they did. They 

 invited me to criticise their pictures in the presence of the facts, 

 and I did once intimate that I failed to find all those rainbows, 



282 



