Between the town of Queenston and the cataract of Niagara lies the
pretty little village of Stamford (close to Lundy Lane, the site of a
famous battle in the last war), and celebrated for its fine air. Near it
is a beautiful house with its domain, called Stamford Park, built and
laid out by a former governor (Sir Peregrine Maitland). It is the only
place I saw in Upper Canada combining our ideas of an elegant,
well-furnished English villa and ornamented grounds, with some of the
grandest and wildest features of the forest scene. It enchanted me
altogether. From the lawn before the house, an open glade, commanding a
park-like range of broken and undulating ground and wooded valleys,
displayed beyond them the wide expanse of Lake Ontario, even the Toronto
light-house, at a distance of thirty miles, being frequently visible to
the naked eye. By the hostess of this charming seat I was conveyed in a
light pony carriage to the hotel at the Falls, and left, with real
kindness, to follow my own devices. The moment I was alone, I hurried
down to the Table-rock. The body of water was more full and tremendous
than in the winter. The spray rose, densely falling again in thick
showers, and behind those rolling volumes of vapour the last gleams of
the evening light shone in lurid brightness, amid amber and crimson
clouds; on the other side, night was rapidly coming on, and all was
black, impenetrable gloom, and "boundless contiguity of shade." It was
very, very beautiful, and strangely awful too! For now it was late, and
as I stood there, lost in a thousand reveries, there was no human being
near, no light but that reflected from the leaping, whirling foam; and
in spite of the deep-voiced continuous thunder of the cataract, there
was such a stillness that I could hear my own heart's pulse throb--or
did I mistake feeling for hearing?--so I strayed homewards, or
housewards I should say, through the leafy, gloomy, pathways,--wet with
the spray, and fairly tired out.
* * * * *
The good people, travellers, describers, poets, and others, who seem to
have hunted through the dictionary for words in which to depict these
cataracts under every aspect, have never said enough of the rapids
above--even for which reason, perhaps, they have struck me the more; not
that any words in any language would have prepared me for what I now
feel in this wondrous scene. Standing to-day on the banks above the
Crescent Fall, near Mr. Street's mill, gazing on the rapids, they left
in my fancy two impressions which seldom meet together,--that of the
sublime and terrible, and that of the elegant and graceful--like a tiger
at play. I could not withdraw my eyes; it was like a fascination.
The verge of the rapids is considerably above the eye; the whole mighty
river comes rushing over the brow of a hill, and as you look up, it
seems coming down to overwhelm you. Then meeting with the rocks, as it
pours down the declivity, it boils and frets like the breakers of the
ocean. Huge mounds of water, smooth, transparent, and gleaming like the
emerald, or rather like the more delicate hue of the chrysopaz, rise up
and bound over some unseen impediment, then break into silver foam,
which leaps into the air in the most graceful fantastic forms; and so it
rushes on, whirling, boiling, dancing, sparkling along, with a playful
impatience, rather than overwhelming fury, rejoicing as if escaped from
bondage, rather than raging in angry might,--wildly, magnificently
beautiful! The idea, too, of the immediate danger, the consciousness
that anything caught within its verge is inevitably hurried to a swift
destination, swallowed up, annihilated, thrills the blood; the immensity
of the picture, spreading a mile at least each way, and framed in by the
interminable forests, adds to the feeling of grandeur; while the giddy,
infinite motion of the headlong waters, dancing and leaping, and
revelling and roaring, in their mad glee, gave me a sensation of
rapturous terror, and at last caused a tension of the nerves in my head,
which obliged me to turn away.
The great ocean, when thus agitated by conflicting winds or opposing
rocks, is a more tremendous thing, but it is merely tremendous,--it
makes us think of our prayers; whereas, while I was looking on these
rapids, beauty and terror, and power and joy, were blended, and so
thoroughly, that even while I trembled and admired, I could have burst
into a wild laugh, and joined the dancing billows in their glorious,
fearful mirth,--
Leaping like Bacchanals from rock to rock,
Flinging the frantic Thyrsus wild and high!
I shall never see again, or feel again, aught like it--never! I did not
think there was an object in nature, animate or inanimate, that could
thus overset me!
* * * * *
To-day I accompanied the family of Colonel Delatre to the American side,
and dined on Goat Island. Though the various views of the two cataracts
be here wonderfully grand and beautiful, and the bridge across the
rapids a sort of miracle, as they say, still it is not altogether to be
compared to the Canadian shore for picturesque scenery. The Americans
have disfigured their share of the rapids with mills and manufactories,
and horrid red brick houses, and other unacceptable, unseasonable sights
and signs of sordid industry. Worse than all is the round tower, which
some profane wretch has erected on the Crescent Fall; it stands there so
detestably impudent and _mal-a-propos_,--it is such a signal, yet puny
monument of bad taste,--so miserably _mesquin_, and so presumptuous,
that I do hope the violated majesty of nature will take the matter in
hand, and overwhelm or cast it down the precipice one of these fine
days, though indeed a barrel of gunpowder were a shorter if not a surer
method. Can you not send us out some Guy Faux, heroically ready to be
victimised in the great cause of insulted nature, and no less insulted
art? But not to tire you with descriptions of precipices, caves, rocks,
woods, and rushing waters, which I can buy here ready made for sixpence,
I will only tell you that our party was very pleasant.
The people who have spoken or written of these Falls of Niagara, have
surely never done justice to their loveliness, their inexpressible,
inconceivable beauty. The feeling of their beauty has become with me a
deeper feeling than that of their sublimity. What a scene this evening!
What splendour of colour! The emerald and chrysopaz of the transparent
waters, the dazzling gleam of the foam, and the snow-white vapour, on
which was displayed the most perfect and gigantic iris I ever
beheld,--forming not a half, but at least two thirds of an entire
circle, one extremity resting on the lesser (or American) Fall, the
other in the very lap of the Crescent Fall, spanning perhaps half a
mile, perfectly resplendent in hue--so gorgeous, so vivid, and yet so
ethereally delicate, and apparently within a few feet of the eye; the
vapours rising into the blue heavens at least four hundred feet, three
times the height of the Falls, and tinted rose and amber with the
evening sun; and over the woods around every possible variety of the
richest foliage,--no, nothing was ever so transcendently lovely! The
effect, too, was so grandly uniform in its eternal sound and movement:
it was quite different from that of those wild, impatient, tumultuous
rapids. It soothed, it melted, it composed, rather than excited.
There are no water-fowl now as in the winter--when driven from the
ice-bound shores and shallows of the lake, they came up here to seek
their food, and sported and wheeled amid the showers of spray. They have
returned to their old quiet haunts; sometimes I miss them: they were a
beautiful variety in the picture.
* * * * *