Niagara Falls.--Perhaps the wisest, if not the best description of the
Falls of Niagara, is in the simple ejaculation of Mrs Butler; for it is
almost useless to attempt to describe when you feel that language fails;
but if the falls cannot be described, the ideas which are conjured up in
the mind, when we contemplate this wonderful combination of grandeur and
beauty, are often worth recording. The lines of Mrs Sigourney, the
American poetess, please me most.
Flow on for ever, in thy glorious robe
Of terror and of beauty; God hath set
His rainbow on thy forehead, and the cloud
Mantles around thy feet. And he doth give
Thy voice of thunder power to speak of him
Eternally--bidding the lip of man
Keep silence, and upon thy rocky altar pour
Incense of awe-struck praise.
When the Indian first looked upon the falls, he declared them to be the
dwelling of the Great Spirit. The savage could not imagine that the
Great Spirit dwelt also in the leaf which he bruised in his hand; but
here it appealed to his senses in thunder and awful majesty, and he was
compelled to acknowledge it.
The effects which the contemplation of these glorious waters produce,
are of course very different, according to one's temperament and
disposition. As I stood on the brink above the falls, continuing for a
considerable time to watch the great mass of water tumbling, dancing,
capering, and rushing wildly along, as if in a hurry to take the leap
and, delighted at it, I could not help wishing that I too had been made
of such stuff as would have enabled me to have joined it; with it to
have rushed innocuously down the precipice; to have rolled uninjured
into the deep unfathomable gulf below, or to have gambolled in the
atmosphere of spray, which rose again in a dense cloud from its
recesses. For about half an hour more I continued to watch the rolling
waters, and then I felt a slight dizziness and a creeping sensation come
over me--that sensation arising from strong excitement, and the same,
probably, that occasions the bird to fall into the jaws of the snake.
This is a feeling which, if too long indulged in, becomes irresistible,
and occasions a craving desire to leap into the flood of rushing waters.
It increased upon me every minute; and retreating from the brink, I
turned my eyes to the surrounding foliage, until the effect of the
excitement had passed away. I looked upon the waters a second time, and
then my thoughts were directed into a very different channel. I wished
myself a magician, that I might transport the falls to Italy, and pour
their whole volume of waters into the crater of Mount Vesuvius; witness
the terrible conflict between the contending elements, and create the
largest steam-boiler that ever entered into the imagination of man.
I have no doubt that the opinion that these falls have receded a
distance of seven miles is correct; but what time must have passed
before even this tremendous power could have sawed away such a mass of
solid rock! Within the memory of man it has receded but a few feet--
changed but little. How many thousand years must these waters have been
flowing and falling, unvarying in their career, and throwing up their
sheets of spray to heaven.
It is impossible for either the eye or the mind to compass the whole
mass of falling water; you cannot measure, cannot estimate its enormous
volume; and this is the reason, perhaps, why travellers often express
themselves disappointed by it. But fix your eye upon one portion--one
falling and heaving wave out of the millions, as they turn over the edge
of the rocks; watch, I say, this fragment for a few minutes, its regular
time-beating motion never varying or changing; pursuing the laws of
nature with a regularity never ceasing and never tiring; minute after
minute; hour after hour; day after day; year after year, until time
recedes into creation: then cast your eyes over the whole multitudinous
mass which is, and has been, performing the same and coeval duty, and
you feel its vastness! Still the majesty of the whole is far too great
for the mind to compass--too stupendous for its limited powers of
reception.
Sunday.--I had intended to have passed the whole day at the Falls; but
an old gentleman whose acquaintance I had made in the steam boat on Lake
Ontario, asked me to go to church; and as I felt he would be annoyed if
I did not, I accompanied him to a Presbyterian meeting not far from the
Falls, which sounded like distant thunder. The sermon was upon
temperance--a favourite topic in America; and the minister rather
quaintly observed, that "alcohol was not sealed by the hand of God." It
was astonishing to me that he did not allude to the Falls, point out
that the seal of God was there, and shew how feeble was the voice of man
when compared to the thunder of the Almighty so close at hand. But the
fact was, he had been accustomed to preach every Sunday with the Falls
roaring in his ear, and (when the wind was in a certain quarter,) with
the spray damping the leaves of his sermon: he therefore did not feel as
we did, and, no doubt, thought his sermon better than that from the God
of the elements.
Yes, it is through the elements that the Almighty has ever deigned to
commune with man, or to execute his supreme will, whether it has been by
the wild waters to destroy an impious race--by the fire hurled upon the
doomed cities--by seas divided, that the chosen might pass through
them--by the thunders on Sinai's Mount when his laws were given to man--
by the pillar of fire or the gushing rock, or by the rushing of mighty
winds. And it is still through the elements that the Almighty speaks to
man, to warn, to terrify, to chasten; to raise him up to wonder, to
praise, and adore. The forked and blinding lightning which, with the
rapidity of thought, dissolves the union between the body and the soul;
the pealing thunder, announcing that the bolt has sped; the fierce
tornado, sweeping away everything in its career, like a besom of wrath;
the howling storm; the mountain waves; the earth quaking, and yawning
wide, in a second overthrowing the work and pride of centuries, and
burying thousands in a living tomb; the fierce vomiting of the crater,
pouring out its flames of liquid fire, and changing fertility to the
arid rock: it is through these that the Deity still speaks to man; yet
what can inspire more awe of him, more reverence, and more love, than
the contemplation of thy falling waters, great Niagara!