Travelers' Original Accounts Since 1840 



1839 

 Arnold 



Greater. At her awful brink the whole architrave of the main 

 abyss gleams like a fixed and glorious work wrought in polished 

 aquamarine or emerald. This exquisitely coloured cornice of 

 the enormous waterfall — this brim of bright tranquillity between 

 fervor of rush and fury of plunge — is its principal feature, and 

 stamps it as far more beautiful than terrible. Indeed the whole 

 spectacle of the famous cataracts is one of delight and of deep- 

 est charm, not by any means of horror or of awe ; since nowhere 

 are the measureless forces of Nature more tenderly revealed, more 

 softly and splendidly clad, more demurely constrained and docile 

 between its steep confines. Even the heart of the abyss, in the 

 recess of the Horseshoe, where the waters of Erie and Superior 

 clash together in tremendous conflict — the inner madness and 

 miracle of which no eye can see or ever will see, by reason of 

 the veils of milky spray and of the rolling clouds of water-drift 

 which for ever hide it — even this central solemnity and shudder- 

 fraught miracle of the monstrous uproar and glory is rendered 

 exquisite, reposeful, and soothing by the lovely rainbows 

 hanging over the turmoil and clamour. From its crest of 

 chrysophrase and silver, indeed, to its broad foot of milky 

 foam and of white stunned waves, too broken and too dazed to 

 begin at first to float away, Niagara appears not terrible, but 

 divinely and deliciously graceful, glad, and lovely — a specimen 

 of the splendour and wonder of water at its finest — a sight to 

 dwell and linger in the mind with ineffaceable images of happy 

 and grateful thought, by no means to affect it either in act of 

 seeing, or to haunt it in future days of memory, with any wild 

 reminiscence of terror or of gloom. 



1889 



Withrow 



WlTHROW, WILLIAM H. Our own country. Canada scenic and 

 descriptive. . . . Toronto. Wm. Briggs. 1 889. Pp. 3 1 7-34 1 . 



The author comments on the exhaustless supply of the Falls and their 

 appearance in winter. He describes the trip under the Falls and the Cave 

 of the Winds, and in his description quotes from Trollope and Dr. 

 Dewart's poem on the Falls. One description for which he gives the 



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