Before my balcony the great cataract is thundering, smoking, glittering
with green and white rollers and rapids, hurling the waters of a whole
continent in splendor and speed over the sharp ledges of the long, brown
rock by which Erie, "the Broad," steps proudly down to Ontario, "the
Beautiful."
The smaller but very imposing American Falls speaks with the louder voice
of the two, because its coiling spirals of twisted and furious flood crash
in full impulse of descent upon the talus of massive boulders heaped up at
its foot.
The resounding impact of water on rocks, the clouds of water-smoke which
rise high in the air, and the river below churned into a whirling cream of
eddy and surge and backwater, unite in a composite effect, at once
magnificent and bewildering.
Far away, Niagara River is seen winding eagerly to its prodigious leap.
You can discern the line of the first breakers, where the river feels the
fatal draw of the cataracts, its current seeming suddenly to leap forward,
stimulated by mad desire, a hidden spell, a dreadful and irresistible
doom.
Far back along the gilded surface of the upper stream, these lines of
dancing, tossing, eager, anxious, and fate-impelled breakers and billows
multiply their white ranks, and spread and close together their leaping
ridges into a wild chaos of racing waves as the brink is approached. And
then, at the brink, there is a curious pause--the momentary peace of the
irrevocable. Those mad upper waters--reaching the great leap--are suddenly
all quiet and glassy, and appear rounded and green as the border of a
field of young rye, at the moment when they turn the angle of the dreadful
ledge and hurl themselves into the snow-white gulf of noise and mist and
mystery underneath.
There is nothing more translucently green, nor more perennially still and
lovely, than Niagara the greater. At this, her awful brink, the whole
architrave of the main abyss gleams like a fixed and glorious work wrought
in polished aquamarine or emerald. This exquisitely colored cornice of the
enormous waterfall--this brim of bright tranquillity between fervor of
rush and fury of plunge--is its principal feature, and stamps it as far
more beautiful than terrible. Even the central solemnity and
shudder-fraught miracle of the monstrous uproar and glory is rendered
exquisite, reposeful, and soothing by the lovely rainbows hanging over the
turmoil and clamor.
From its crest of chrysoprase and silver, indeed, to its broad foot of
milky foam and of its white-stunned waves, too broken and too dazed to
begin at first to float away, Niagara appears not terrible, but divinely
and deliciously graceful, glad and lovely--a specimen of the splendor of
water at its finest--a sight to dwell and linger in the mind with
ineffaceable images of happy and grateful thought, by no means to affect
it in seeing or to haunt it in future days of memory with any wild
reminiscences of terror or of gloom.