Oh that I had never heard of Niagara till I beheld it! Blessed
were the wanderers of old, who heard its deep roar, sounding
through the woods, as the summons to an unknown wonder, and
approached its awful brink, in all the freshness of native
feeling. Had its own mysterious voice been the first to warn
me of its existence, then, indeed, I might have knelt down and
worshipped. But I had come thither, haunted with a vision of
foam and fury, and dizzy cliffs, and an ocean tumbling down
out of the sky--a scene, in short, which nature had too much
good taste and calm simplicity to realize. My mind had
struggled to adapt these false conceptions to the reality, and
finding the effort vain, a wretched sense of disappointment
weighed me down. I climbed the precipice, and threw myself on
the earth feeling that I was unworthy to look at the Great
Falls, and careless about beholding them again.
A scale for measuring English composition in the eighth grade, which
takes account of different types of composition, such as narration,
description, and the like, has been developed by Dr. Frank W. Ballou, of
Boston.[27] For those interested in the following up of the problem of
English composition this scale will prove interesting and valuable.
Several scales have been developed for the measurement of the ability of
children in reading. Among them may be mentioned the scale derived by
Professor Thorndike for measuring the understanding of sentences.[28]
This scale calls attention to that element in reading which is possibly
the most important of them all, that is, the attempt to get meanings. We
are all of us, for the most part, concerned not primarily with giving
expression through oral reading, but, rather, in getting ideas from the
printed page. A sample of this scale is given on the following page.
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