Niagara Falls 



i860 I hope that all this is not decrying the attractions of any 



worthy adjunct of the Cataract, such as the Whirlpool. There 

 is of course no other such, and I was proud and glad to believe 

 that the Whirlpool was chiefly on the American side, or the first 

 part of it, or was at first nearly if not solely accessible from our 

 territory ; and I did not find out till long after that I was wrong. 

 The Whirlpool, seen from the heights around it, has that effect 

 of sculpturesque repose which I have always found the finest 

 thing in the Cataract itself. Like that it is impassioned, while 

 the Rapids are passionate. From the top the circling lines of 

 the Whirlpool seemed graven in a level of chalcedony; the illu- 

 sion of arrest was so perfect that I was almost sorry ever to have 

 lost it, though I do not know what I could have done with it if 

 I had kept it. I duly studied my phrases about it for my letters 

 to that Cincinnati paper, and it is probably from some of them, 

 printed or unprinted, that I speak now. These things linger long 

 in the mind ; and it is not always from frugality that the observer 

 of the picturesque uses the same terms again and again. Happily, 

 I am not obliged to describe the Whirlpool to the reader, as I 

 was then, and I have no impression to impart except this sense 

 of its worthy unity with the Cataract in what I may call its highest 

 aesthetic quality, its repose. 



If the reader does not believe in this, he may go and look; 

 but there is one fact of this first visit of mine to Niagara which 

 he must helplessly take my word for. That fact is Blondin, who 

 is closely allied in my mind with the Whirlpool, because I saw 

 him cross the river above the frantic Rapids not far from it. If 

 this association is too mechanical, too material, then I will go far- 

 ther, and say that when Blondin had got such a distance into the 

 danger, he, too, became an illusion of Repose; and I defy the 

 most skeptical reader, who was not then present, to gainsay me. 



Why those rapids just below the large Suspension Bridge were 

 chosen to stretch Blondin's cable over, I do not know, unless it 

 was because the river narrows to a gorge there, and because 

 those rapids are more horrid, in the eighteenth-century sense, 



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