Niagara Falls 



i860 preserved in alcohol that I should not be surprised if he were 

 there yet, gave me an account of it from the top of a tower in 

 which he seemed to be fortified. That poor little carnage has 

 shrunken into so small a horror since the battles of the great 

 war, then impending, that I feel somewhat like excusing the 

 mention of it now ; but when I visited the scene in 1 860, I was 

 aware of several emotions which, if not of prime importance on 

 the spot, were very capable of being worked up into something 

 worth while in my letter to the Cincinnati paper. I tried to give 

 them a Heinesque cast, and I made a good deal of the tipsy 

 veteran. 



Really, however, I did see a great many things at Niagara on 

 that first visit, and I am sorry to say that I saw them chiefly on 

 the Canada side. My patriotism has always felt the hurt of the 

 fact that our great national cataract is best viewed from a 

 foreign shore. There can be no denying, at least in a confidence 

 like the present, that the Canadian Fall, if not more majestic, 

 is certainly more massive, than the American. I used to watch 

 its mighty wall of waters with a jealousy almost as green as 

 themselves, and then try to believe that the knotted tumble of 

 our Fall was finer. I could only make out that it had more 

 apparent movement. But at times, and if one looked steadily at 

 any part of the Cataract, the descending floods seemed to hang in 

 arrest above the gulfs below. Those liquid steeps, those, preci- 

 pices of molten emerald, all broken and fissured with opal and 

 crystal, seemed like heights of sure and firmset earth, and the 

 mists that climbed them half-way were as still to the eye in their 

 subtler sort. This effect of immobility is what gives its supreme 

 beauty to Niagara, its repose. If there is agony there, it is in the 

 agony of Niobe, of Laocoon. It moves the beholder, but itself 

 it does not move. 



I spent a great deal of time trying to say this or something like 

 it, which now and always seemed to me true of Niagara, though 

 I do not insist that it shall seem so to others. I could not see 

 those iridescences that everywhere illumined the waters to my 



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