The roar of waters ...
often have been applied to our cataract. Mr. Gray may or may not have
been familiar with them. In any event he improved on the earlier poet's
figure.
Merely as a matter of chronicle, it is well to record here the names of
several writers, some of them of considerable reputation, who have
contributed to the poetry of Niagara. Alfred B. Street's well-known
narrative poem, "Frontenac," contains Niagara passages. So does Levi
Bishop's metrical volume "Teuchsa Grondie" ("Whip-poor-will"), the
Niagara portion dedicated to the Hon. Augustus S. Porter. Ever since
Chateaubriand wrote "Atala," authors have been prompted to associate
Indian legends with Niagara, but none has done this more happily than
William Trumbull, whose poem, "The Legend of the White Canoe,"
illustrated by F. V. Du Mond, is one of the most artistic works in all
the literature of Niagara.
The Rev. William Ellery Channing, the Rev. Joseph H. Clinch, the Rev.
Joseph Cook, Christopher P. Cranch, Oliver I. Taylor, Grenville Mellen,
Prof. Moffat, John Savage, Augustus N. Lowry, Claude James Baxley of
Virginia, Abraham Coles, M. D., Henry Howard Brownell, the Rev. Roswell
Park, Willis Gaylord Clark, Mary J. Wines, M. E. Wood, E. H. Dewart, G.
W. Cutter, J. N. McJilton, and the Chicago writer, Harriet Monroe, are,
most of them, minor poets (some, perhaps, but poets by courtesy), whose
tributes to our cataract are contained in their collected volumes of
verse. In E. G. Holland's "Niagara and Other Poems" (1861), is a poem on
Niagara thirty-one pages long, with several pages of notes, "composed
for the most part by the Drachenfels, one of the Seven Mountains of the
Rhine, in the vicinity of Bonn, September, 1856, and delivered as a part
of an address on American Scenery the day following." Among the Canadian
poets who have attempted the theme, besides several already named, may
be recorded John Breakenridge, a volume of whose verse was printed at
Kingston in 1846; Charles Sangster, James Breckenridge, John Imrie, and
William Rice, the last three of Toronto. The French-Canadian poet, Louis
Frechette, has written an excellent poem, "Le Niagara." Wm. Sharpe, M.
D., "of Ireland," wrote at length in verse on "Niagara and Nature
Worship." Charles Pelham Mulvaney touches the region in his poem, "South
Africa Remembered at Niagara." One of the most striking effusions on the
subject comes from the successful Australian writer, Douglas Sladen. It
is entitled "To the American Fall at Niagara," and is dated "Niagara,
Oct. 18, 1899":
Niagara, national emblem! Cataract
Born of the maddened rapids, sweeping down
Direct, resistless from the abyss's crown
Into the deep, fierce pool with vast impact
Scarce broken by the giant boulders, stacked
To meet thine onslaught, threatening to drown
Each tillaged plain, each level-loving town
'Twixt thee and ocean. Lo! the type exact!
America Niagarized the world.
Europe, a hundred years agone, beheld
An avalanche, like pent-up Erie, hurled
Through barriers, to which the rocks of eld
Seemed toy things--leaping into godlike space
A sign and wonder to the human race.[87]
Friedrich Bodenstedt and Wilhelm Meister of Germany, J. B. Scandella and
the Rev. Santo Santelli of Italy ("Cascada di Niagara," 1841), have
place among our Niagara poets. So, conspicuously, has Juan Antonio
Perez Bonalde, whose illustrated volume, "El Poema del Niagara,"
dedicated to Emilio Castelar, with a prose introduction of twenty-five
pages by the Cuban martyr Jose Marti, was published in New York,
reaching at least a second edition, in 1883. Several Mexican poets have
addressed themselves to Niagara. "A la Catarata del Niagara" is a sonnet
by Don Manuel Carpio, whose collected works have been issued at Vera
Cruz, Paris, and perhaps elsewhere. In the dramatic works of Don
Vincente Riva Palacio and Don Juan A. Mateos is found "La Catarata del
Niagara," a three-act drama in verse; the first two acts occur in
Mexico, in the house of _Dona Rosa_, the third act is at Niagara Falls,
the time being 1847.[88] The Spanish poet Antonio Vinageras, nearly
fifty years ago, wrote a long ode on Niagara, dedicating it to "la
celebre poetisa, Dona Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda." In no language is
there a nobler poem on Niagara than the familiar work by Maria Jose
Heredosia, translated from the Spanish by William Cullen Bryant. The
Comte de Fleury, who visited Niagara a few years ago, left a somewhat
poetical souvenir in French verse. Fredrika Bremer, whose prose is often
unmetered poetry even after translation, wrote of Niagara in a brief
poem. The following is a close paraphrase of the Swedish original:
Niagara is the betrothal of Earth's life
With the Heavenly life.
That has Niagara told me to-day.
And now can I leave Niagara. She has
Told me her word of primeval being.
Another Scandinavian poet, John Nyborn, has written a meritorious poem
on Niagara Falls, an adaptation of which, in English, was published some
years since by Dr. Albin Bernays.
* * * * *
It is a striking fact that Niagara's stimulus to the poetic mind has
been quite as often through the ear as through the eye. The best
passages of the best poems are prompted by the sound of the falling
waters, rather than by the expanse of the flood, the height of cliffs,
or the play of light. In Mr. Bulkley's work, which indeed exhausts the
whole store of simile and comparison, we perpetually hear the voice of
the falls, the myriad voices of nature, the awful voice of God.
"Minstrel of the Floods,"
he cries:
What paeans full of triumph dost thou hymn!
. . . . . . . . .
However varied is the rhythm sweet
Of thine unceasing song! The ripple oft
Astray along thy banks a lyric is
Of love; the cool drops trickling down thy sides
Are gentle sonnets; and thy lesser falls
Are strains elegiac, that sadly sound
A monody of grief; thy whirlpool fierce,
A shrill-toned battle-song; thy river's rush
A strain heroic with its couplet rhymes;
. . . . . . . . .
While the full sweep of thy close-crowded tide
Resounds supreme o'er all, an epic grand.
Of this class, too, is the "Apostrophe to Niagara," by one B. Frank
Palmer, in 1855. It is said to have been "written with the pencil in a
few minutes, the author seated on the bank, drenched, from the mighty
bath at Termination Rock, and still listening to the roar and feeling
the eternal jar of the cataract." The Rev. T. Starr King, upon reading
it in 1855, said: "The apostrophe has the music of Niagara in it." As a
typical example of the devotional apostrophe it is perhaps well to give
it in full:
This is Jehovah's fullest organ strain!
I hear the liquid music rolling, breaking.
From the gigantic pipes the great refrain
Bursts on my ravished ear, high thoughts awaking!
The low sub-bass, uprising from the deep,
Swells the great paean as it rolls supernal--
Anon, I hear, at one majestic sweep
The diapason of the keys eternal!
Standing beneath Niagara's angry flood--
The thundering cataract above me bounding--
I hear the echo: "Man, there is a God!"
From the great arches of the gorge resounding!
Behold, O man! nor shrink aghast in fear!
Survey the vortex boiling deep before thee!
The Hand that ope'd the liquid gateway here
Hath set the beauteous bow of promise o'er thee!
Here, in the hollow of that Mighty Hand,
Which holds the basin of the tidal ocean,
Let not the jarring of the spray-washed strand
Disturb the orisons of pure devotion.
Roll on, Niagara! great River King!
Beneath thy sceptre all earth's rulers, mortal,
Bow reverently; and bards shall ever sing
The matchless grandeur of thy peerless portal!
I hear, Niagara, in this grand strain,
His voice, who speaks in flood, in flame and thunder--
Forever mayst thou, singing, roll and reign--
Earth's grand, sublime, supreme, supernal wonder.
Such lines as these--which might be many times multiplied--recall Eugene
Thayer's ingenious and highly poetic paper on "The Music of
Niagara."[89] Indeed, many of the prose writers, as well as the
versifiers, have found their best tribute to Niagara inspired by the
mere sound of falling waters.
That Niagara's supreme appeal to the emotions is not through the eye but
through the ear, finds a striking illustration in "Thoughts on Niagara,"
a poem of about eighty lines written prior to 1854 by Michael McGuire, a
blind man.[90] Here was one whose only impressions of the cataract came
through senses other than that of sight. As is usual with the blind, he
uses phrases that imply consciousness of light; yet to him, as to other
poets whose devotional natures respond to this exhibition of natural
laws, all the phenomena merge in "the voice of God":
I stood where swift Niagara pours its flood
Into the darksome caverns where it falls,
And heard its voice, as voice of God, proclaim
The power of Him, who let it on its course
Commence, with the green earth's first creation;
And I was where the atmosphere shed tears,
As giving back the drops the waters wept,
On reaching that great sepulchre of floods,--
Or bringing from above the bow of God,
To plant its beauties in the pearly spray.
And as I stood and heard, _though seeing nought_,
Sad thoughts took deep possession of my mind,
And rude imagination venturing forth,
Did toil to pencil, though in vain, that scene,
Which, in its every feature, spoke of God.
The poem, which as a whole is far above commonplace, develops a pathetic
prayer for sight; and employs much exalted imagery attuned to the
central idea that here Omnipotence speaks without ceasing; here is
A temple, where Jehovah is felt most.
But for the most part, the world's strong singers have passed Niagara
by; nor has Niagara's newest aspect, that of a vast engine of energy to
be used for the good of man, yet found worthy recognition by any poet of
potentials.
* * * * *
This survey, though incomplete, is yet sufficiently comprehensive to
warrant a few conclusions. More than half of all the verse on the
subject which I have examined was written during the second quarter of
this century. The first quarter, as has been shown, was the age of
Niagara's literary discovery, and produced a few chronicles of curious
interest. During the last half of the century--the time in which
practically the whole brilliant and substantial fabric of American
literature has been created--Niagara well-nigh has been ignored by the
poets. In all our list, Goldsmith and Moore are the British writers of
chief eminence who have touched the subject in verse, though many
British poets, from Edwin Arnold to Oscar Wilde, have written poetic
prose about Niagara. Of native Americans, I have found no names in the
list of Niagara singers greater than those of Drake and Mrs. Sigourney.
Emerson nor Lowell, Whittier nor Longfellow, Holmes nor Stedman, has
given our Niagara wonder the dowry of a single line. Whitman, indeed,
alludes to Niagara in his poem "By Blue Ontario's Shore," but his poetic
vision makes no pause at the falls; nor does that of Joseph O'Connor,
who in his stirring and exalted Columbian poem, "The Philosophy of
America," finds a touch of color for his continental cosmorama by
letting his sweeping glance fall for a moment,
To where, 'twixt Erie and Ontario,
Leaps green Niagara with a giant roar.
But in such a symphony as his, Niagara is a subservient element, not the
dominating theme. Most of the Niagara poets have been of local repute,
unknown to fame.
What, then, must we conclude? Shall we say with Martin Farquhar
Tupper--who has contributed to the alleged poetry of the place--that
there is nothing sublime about Niagara? The many poetic and impassioned
passages in prose descriptions are against such a view. If dimensions,
volume, exhibition of power, are elements of sublimity, Niagara Falls
are sublime. But it cannot be said that superlative exhibitions of
nature, some essentially universal phenomena, like those of the sea and
sky, excepted, have been made the specific subject of verse, with a high
degree of success. The reason is not far to seek, and lies in the
inherent nature of poetry. It is a chief essential of poetry that it
express, in imaginative form, the insight of the human soul. The feeble
poets who have addressed themselves to Niagara have stopped, for the
most part, with purely objective utterance. In some few instances, as we
have seen, a truly subjective regard has given us noble lines.
The poetic in nature is essentially independent of the detail of natural
phenomena. A waterfall 150 feet high is not intrinsically any more
poetic than one but half that height; or a thunder-peal than the tinkle
of a rill. True poetry must be self-expression, as well as interpretive
of truths which are manifested through physical phenomena. Hence it is
in the nature of things that a nameless brook shall have its Tennyson,
or a Niagara flow unsung.
* * * * *