Niagara Falls 



backwater, unite in a composite effect, at once magnificent and 1889 

 bewildering. But if you listen attentively you will always hear 

 the profound diapason of the great Fall — that surnamed the 

 horseshoe — sounding superbly amid the loudest clamour and 

 tumult of its sister, a deeper and grander note; and whenever 

 for a time the gaze rests with inexhaustible wonder upon that 

 fierce and tumultuary American Fall, this mightier and still more 

 marvellous Horseshoe steals it away again with irresistible 

 fascination. 



Full in front lies that wholly indescribable spectacle at this 

 instant. Its solemn voice — an octave lower than the excited, 

 leaping, almost angry cry of fervid life from the lesser cataract — 

 resounds through the golden summer morning air like the distant 

 roar from the streets of fifty Londons all in full activity. Far 

 away, between the dark grey trees of Goat Island and the 

 fir-woods of the Canadian shore, the Niagara River is seen wind- 

 ing eagerly to its prodigious leap. You can discern, even from 

 this balcony, the line of the first breakers, where the Niagara 

 River feels, across its whole breadth, the fateful draw of the 

 Cataracts, where its current seems suddenly to leap forward, 

 stimulated by a mad desire, a hidden spell, a dreadful and 

 irresistible doom. You can note far back along the glided sur- 

 face of the upper stream how these lines of dancing, tossing, 

 eager, anxious, and fate-impelled breakers and billows multiply 

 their white ranks and spread and close together their leaping 

 ridges into a wild chaos of racing waves as the brink is 

 approached. And then, at the brink there is a curious pause — 

 the momentary peace of the Irrevocable. Those mad upper 

 waters — reaching the great leap — are suddenly become all 

 quiet, and glassy, and rounded, and green as the border of a 

 field of rye, while they turn the angle of the dreadful ledge and 

 hurl themselves into the snow-white gulf of noise, and mist, and 

 mystery underneath. 



There is nothing more translucently green, nor more perennially 



still and lovely, than the actual hanging brow of Niagara the 



347 



