Niagara Falls 



1864 and grandeur, for there was before me again the same glorious 

 Borre,t scene that I have so briefly sketched ; only it was a thousand times 



intensified. 



We ascended, and took a view from every one of the numerous 

 points from which tourists are expected to survey the Falls, and 

 paid all those preposterous sums which tourists are invariably 

 doomed to give — for Niagara has its excursionists by thousands, 

 and its " look-outs," " summer-houses," " retreats," " stair- 

 cases," " perilous seats," and such-like attractions for an excur- 

 sion party; but it is less cockneyfied, for all that, than many a 

 place that I have visited — less so than Chamouni and Rigi, and 

 such favorite resorts that do not draw half so many visitors as 

 the Falls. Having done our duty as pure excursionists, and been 

 bled accordingly, we took a carriage and drove off to the 

 Canadian side of the river, crossing by the famous suspension 

 bridge which connects the British and American territories. . . . 



The bridge is two miles below the falls, so that the view 

 thence is too distant to be effective; but the drive up to them 

 along the Canadian cliff, past ** The Clifton House," the great 

 Canadian hotel, is, I think, the most beautiful road I have ever 

 seen. It is from this side that you get, in one grand compre- 

 hensive landscape, the whole length of the American and Cana- 

 dian Falls, with the steep precipices of Goat Island between 

 them, and the cliffs of the American bank further down the gorge, 

 and above them the roofs, and spires, and gables of the town 

 peering out from amid the forest that forms the background of 

 the picture. Table Rock is a lofty shelving promontory of 

 limestone jutting out from the Canadian shore close upon the 

 brink of the plunge of the great Horse-shoe Fall; and there we 

 sat, as all tourists do, and gazed in rapture at the marvels of 

 nature unfolded, around, above, beneath us. I cannot tell you 

 what we saw; you could not depicture it to yourself if I could. 

 I will only say that that one view from Table Rock would repay 

 anyone a journey from the farthest corner of the world. All the 

 landscapes I have ever seen — all the snow-pictures of the Alps 



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