At Home And Abroad | Page 5

palace, or "stumping," as he boasts to have done, "up the
Vatican stairs, into the Pope's presence, in my old boots," I felt here; it
looks really well enough, I felt, and was inclined, as you suggested, to
give my approbation as to the one object in the world that would not
disappoint.
But all great expression, which, on a superficial survey, seems so easy
as well as so simple, furnishes, after a while, to the faithful observer, its
own standard by which to appreciate it. Daily these proportions
widened and towered more and more upon my sight, and I got, at last, a
proper foreground for these sublime distances. Before coming away, I
think I really saw the full wonder of the scene. After a while it so drew
me into itself as to inspire an undefined dread, such as I never knew
before, such as may be felt when death is about to usher us into a new
existence. The perpetual trampling of the waters seized my senses. I felt
that no other sound, however near, could be heard, and would start and
look behind me for a foe. I realized the identity of that mood of nature
in which these waters were poured down with such absorbing force,
with that in which the Indian was shaped on the same soil. For
continually upon my mind came, unsought and unwelcome, images,
such as never haunted it before, of naked savages stealing behind me
with uplifted tomahawks; again and again this illusion recurred, and
even after I had thought it over, and tried to shake it off, I could not
help starting and looking behind me.
As picture, the falls can only be seen from the British side. There they
are seen in their veils, and at sufficient distance to appreciate the
magical effects of these, and the light and shade. From the boat, as you
cross, the effects and contrasts are more melodramatic. On the road
back from the whirlpool, we saw them as a reduced picture with delight.
But what I liked best was to sit on Table Rock, close to the great fall.
There all power of observing details, all separate consciousness, was
quite lost.
Once, just as I had seated myself there, a man came to take his first
look. He walked close up to the fall, and, after looking at it a moment,

with an air as if thinking how he could best appropriate it to his own
use, he spat into it.
This trait seemed wholly worthy of an age whose love of utility is such
that the Prince Puckler Muskau suggests the probability of men coming
to put the bodies of their dead parents in the fields to fertilize them, and
of a country such as Dickens has described; but these will not, I hope,
be seen on the historic page to be truly the age or truly the America. A
little leaven is leavening the whole mass for other bread.
The whirlpool I like very much. It is seen to advantage after the great
falls; it is so sternly solemn. The river cannot look more imperturbable,
almost sullen in its marble green, than it does just below the great fall;
but the slight circles that mark the hidden vortex seem to whisper
mysteries the thundering voice above could not proclaim,--a meaning
as untold as ever.
It is fearful, too, to know, as you look, that whatever has been
swallowed by the cataract is like to rise suddenly to light here, whether
uprooted tree, or body of man or bird.
The rapids enchanted me far beyond what I expected; they are so swift
that they cease to seem so; you can think only of their beauty. The
fountain beyond the Moss Islands I discovered for myself, and thought
it for some time an accidental beauty which it would not do to leave,
lest I might never see it again. After I found it permanent, I returned
many times to watch the play of its crest. In the little waterfall beyond,
Nature seems, as she often does, to have made a study for some larger
design. She delights in this,--a sketch within a sketch, a dream within a
dream. Wherever we see it, the lines of the great buttress in the
fragment of stone, the hues of the waterfall copied in the flowers that
star its bordering mosses, we are delighted; for all the lineaments
become fluent, and we mould the scene in congenial thought with its
genius.
People complain of the buildings at Niagara, and fear to see it further
deformed. I cannot sympathize with such an apprehension: the
spectacle is capable of swallowing up all such objects; they are not seen

in the great whole, more than an earthworm in a wide field.