Niagara Falls 



i860 landscape was an outrage to it. I will not even try to recall the 

 stupid and squalid contrivances which defaced it at every point, 

 and extorted a coin from the insulted traveller at every turn. 

 They are all gone now, and in the keeping of the State the whole 

 redeemed and disenthralled vicinity of Niagara is an object lesson 

 in what public ownership, whenever it comes, does for beauty. 



I had the eagerness of a true believer to see this result, and 

 even before I went to look at the cataract on my last visit a 

 winter ago, I drove about and made sure from the liberated land- 

 scape that the people were in possession of their own. It was 

 wonderful, even in midwinter, the difference in dignity and pros- 

 perity that not so much appeared as seemed to reappear, and to 

 find in the beholder's consciousness a sense of what that divine 

 prospect must have been when the eye of the white man first gazed 

 upon it. The landscape had got back something of its youth, 

 and in my joy in it I got back something of mine. 



I do not say that I got much. At fifty, one is at least not twice 

 as young as at twenty-five. But I was very fairly young again 

 when I came to Niagara in the midwinter of my midwinter year, 

 and I was certainly as impatient as I could have been a quarter 

 of a century earlier to see the ice-bridge below the Falls and the 

 ice-cone that their breath had formed; in fact, I had waited a 

 good deal longer to see them. Shall I own that at first sight 

 these were a disappointment? At first sight the Falls themselves 

 are a disappointment, for we come to them with something other 

 than the image of their grand and simple adequacy in our 

 minds, and seek to match them with that distempered inven- 

 tion of the ignorant fancy. I had supposed the ice-cone was a 

 sharp peak, jutting up in front of the Cataract, not reflecting that 

 it must be what it always is, a rounded knoll, built up finely, 

 finely, slowly, slowly, out of the spectral shapes of mist, seized 

 by the frost and flung down upon the frozen river. When you 

 remember that this ice-cone is formed of the innumerable falls of 

 these ghosts, I thing one ought to be content with the Roman- 

 esque dome-shape of the mound, however Gothic one's expecta- 



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