sent them back, charging them not to expect us too soon, as we meant to
look about us a while.
We had a stout negro for a guide. He took me by the hand, and led me
through the spray. I presently found the method of keeping myself at my
ease. It was to hold down the brim of my hat, so as to protect my eyes
from the dashing water, and to keep my mouth shut. With these
precautions I could breathe and see freely in the midst of a tumult
which would otherwise be enough to extinguish one's being. A hurricane
blows up from the caldron; a deluge drives at you from all parts; and
the noise of both wind and waters, reverberated from the cavern, is
inconceivable. Our path was sometimes a wet ledge of rock just broad
enough to allow one person at a time to creep along; in other places we
walked over heaps of fragments both slippery and unstable.[6] If all had
been dry and quiet, I might probably have thought this path above the
boiling basin dangerous, and have trembled to pass it; but amid the
hubbub of gusts and floods, it appeared so firm a footing that I had no
fear of slipping into the caldron. From the moment that I perceived that
we were actually behind the cataract, and not in a mere cloud of spray,
the enjoyment was intense. I not only saw the watery curtain before me
like tempest-driven snow, but by momentary glances could see the crystal
roof of this most wonderful of Nature's palaces. The precise point where
the flood left the rock was marked by a gush of silvery light, which, of
course, was brighter where the waters were shooting forward than below
where they fell perpendicularly. There was light enough to see one
another's features by, and even to give a shadow to the side of the
projecting rock which barred our farther progress. When we came within a
few paces of this projection, our guide, by a motion of his hand (for
speaking was out of the question), forbade my advancing farther. But it
was no time and place to be stopped by anything but impossibilities. I
saw that though there was no regular path on the other side of the
guide, there were two pieces of rock wide enough for my feet, by
standing on which I might touch the wall which limited our walk. I made
the guide press himself back against the rock, and crossed between him
and the caldron, and easily gained my object--laying my hand on
Termination Rock. When I returned to my place Dr. F. passed both the
guide and myself for the same purpose. In returning my hat blew off, in
spite of all my efforts to hold it on. The guide put his upon my head,
and that was carried away in like manner. I ought to have been
instructed to tie it well on, for mere holding will not do in a
hurricane. It is a proof that we were well lighted in our cavern, that
we all saw the outline of a hat which was jammed between two stones some
way beneath us. The guide made for this, looking just as if he were
coolly walking down into destruction; for the volumes of spray curled
thickly up, as if eager to swallow him. He grasped the hat, but found it
too much beaten to pieces to be of any use.
Footnote 6: A rope has since been stretched along the rock to serve for
a handrail. This must render the expedition far less formidable than
before.
Mrs. F. says we looked like three gliding ghosts when her anxious eye
first caught our forms moving behind the cloud. She was glad enough to
see us; for some one passing by had made her expect us at least two
minutes before we appeared. Dripping at all points as we were, we
scudded under the rocks and up the staircase to our dressing-rooms,
after which we wrote our names among those of the adventurers who have
performed the same exploit, and received a certificate of our having
visited Termination Rock. I was told that a fee and a wetting in the
spray may secure such a certificate at any time. Be this as it may, ours
were honest.
When we came down in our own likeness, Mrs. F. had found a glorious seat
for us on a rock which jutted outward and upward, commanding the entire
range of the falls, with every advantage of light, and also of solitude;
no inconsiderable gain in a place where tourists may be heard discussing
on Table Rock the probability of there being chickens for dinner. I felt
some pain in my chest for a few hours, but was not otherwise injured by
the expedition. When the other members of our party joined us, they were
somewhat surprised to hear what we had done; and one of them followed
our example another day.
I look back upon this morning as the very best of the many I spent at
the falls. We found several new points of view, and the weather was
divine. We clambered down to the water's edge, where men were gathering
spars and other "curiosities." We sat long amusing ourselves with
watching the vain attempts of the tree-trunks, which had been carried
over from above, to get any farther down the river. They were whisked
about like twigs in the boiling waters, and sometimes made a vigorous
shoot as if to get free of the eddies; but as often as they reached a
particular spot they were sure to be turned back, and sucked up the
stream to try again. I think they must be doing penance there still,
unless, enormous logs as they are, they have been dashed to pieces. When
the sun became too hot to be borne below, we came up to the foot of the
staircase and sat in the shade, drinking from the drip the soft shower
which could not make itself heard amid the solemn roar of the floods.
Here Charley stood, placing spouts of reed which might convey water from
the drip wherewith to wash his spars. Not a word of wonder had we from
him. He gloried in the scene, and feared nothing, climbing, with the
help of his father's strong hand, wherever it was practicable to set his
little foot; but there was no wonder. The age of wonder has not arrived
to children, savages, and other ignorant persons. They know too little
of purposes, means, and obstructions to be aware of what either divine
or human achievement is. A child believes you if you promise to take him
into the moon; and a savage supposes that you eclipse the sun by firing
a musket. An ignorant person annoys Mr. Babbage, after much praise of
his machine, by asking to know one thing more: "If you put a question in
wrong, will the answer come out right?" Charley would hardly have asked
this question, child as he was; but he did not share our wonder at the
cataract. He enjoyed the climbing, and the rainbows, and the emerald
pillars based on clouds, which was the form the floods bore this sultry
noon; but he went on washing his spars as tranquilly as if he had been
beside our favourite brook in the wood at Stockbridge. His pity was
stirred up this morning, however, with a story of a bird which I saw
perish. It had got bewildered in the circuit of the Horseshoe Fall. I
saw it driving and fluttering about for a minute or two in the spray,
when it flew directly into the sheet, and was swallowed up.
The next day was devoted to Goat Island. Dr. F., who learned English to
the last degree of perfection in little more than two years, happened to
say one day that there was one English word whose exact meaning he did
not understand, _dawdle_. We promised to afford him an exemplification
of it this day. There was also a joke against me. I was now a practised
traveller; and having found how the pleasures of travelling are
economized by business-like habits of arrangement, I was the prompter of
our somewhat inexperienced party about ordering dinner, packing at
convenient times, and so contriving as to have our thoughts at perfect
liberty for pleasure while we were out of doors, instead of having to
run or send to our lodgings about business which might have been settled
while we were there. They asked me whether I could spend a whole day
without thinking of time, meals, or the fitness of things in any way. No
one was better pleased with such liberty than I; so we left behind us
even our watches. It appears, however, that somebody must have carried
money, for food was brought to us, and, doubtless, honestly paid for.
At some unknown hour of a bright morning, therefore, we set forth from
our hotel, and in due time reached the ferry. The entire party paid
sufficient attention to business to sit properly in the boat, which is
no place for freak and frolic while bobbing about among the eddies. We
_dawdled_ long about the American Fall. I had never before been fully
aware of its power over the senses. To-day I saw a lady who was sitting
on the bank--as safe a seat as an armchair by the fireside--convulsively
turn away from the scene and clasp the ground. Yet the water flows so
tranquilly that I should not be afraid to stand in the flood near the
bank where it takes the leap. I tried the force of the water there, and
found it very moderate. After completing the ascent, Mrs. F. and I were
standing looking at the rapids, when a letter was handed to me. Somebody
had actually been mundane enough to remember the postoffice, and to go
to it! I was glad it was not I. Further sins against the spirit of the
day were presently committed. Of course, I cannot say what time it was,
but, by the heat, probably about the middle of the day, when the ladies
were sitting on the stem of a tree, in a tiny island amid the roaring
rapids--an interesting love-story being their topic--and the gentlemen
were seen approaching with bread, biscuits, cheese, ale, and lemonade.
They had not even forgotten glasses. We ate our dinner on a bench under
the trees, all except Charley, who niched himself in an ash which parted
from the root into many stems. The boy looked like a beautiful fairy,
and, for his own part, declared that this was far better than dining in
any house.
We dawdled hours away in Goat Island; now lying on the grassy bank with
our feet almost into the rapids; now fanning ourselves in the
translucent green shades of the wood, among rabbits and goats, and then
gathering new wild-flowers from the multitude which blossomed under our
feet, the roar of the falls solemnizing all. The timid ones sat in the
alcove erected above the Horseshoe Fall, while the rest went down to the
Terrapin Bridge and Tower. The tower, forty feet high, is built on rocks
in the midst of the rapids, and its summit affords an absolutely
complete view of the scene. The bridge is built on logs which extend
from rock to rock in the rapids to the edge of the precipice, the flood
gushing beneath in a dizzying whirl. At my first visit this bridge had
been complete, and, to all appearance, secure. I had stood on its
extreme point, which projected over the precipice. There I hung
suspended above the fall, standing in the air on the extremity of a
beam, and without any suspicion that I was not perfectly safe. It was
there that I learned some of the secrets of the cataract. I saw there
what can be seen nowhere else, the emerald columns broken and forced up,
and falling again in gushes of diamonds, which again were melted into
wreaths of dazzling snow. It was now too late to see this any more. The
bridge had broken down some way from the end; the handrail was gone; and
the brink of the precipice was no longer accessible. We got to the
tower, however, and farther; and Charley and his father stepped down
from the bridge among the rocks, and stood amid the water very near the
brink of the great fall! Their position was shown to be perfectly safe
by the verdure of these rocks. Slight shrubs, rooted in their crevices,
were full of leaf. Their smallest twigs were tossed in the never-dying
breeze without being snapped. Yet we were glad when our friends were
safe on the bridge again.
We descended the Biddle staircase--the spiral staircase fixed against
the perpendicular rock in Goat Island--and pursued a narrow path from
its foot back to the fall, where we found a glacier! An enormous pile of
snow and ice lay against the rock, so solid, under this intense June
sun, that Charley climbed to the top of it. Here every successive pulse
of the cataract was like a cannon shot a few yards off, so that there
was no standing it long; there was much yet to do; and the party
probably observed, though no one chose to mention it, that the sun was
going down. We crossed the detached American Fall by its rustic bridge,
and hunted it back to its retreat in the wood. Our faces were now turned
homeward; but we lingered long in the shades, and afterward at Bath
Island, where some one observed that it would be dusk before we could
reach the ferry, and that the walk home on the Canada side was not of a
kind to be prosecuted in the dark. The sun disappeared before we reached
the ferry-house, and the panorama from the river was seen in the
magnitude and majesty of twilight. In the dark woods on the Canada side
we made ourselves visible to each other by catching fireflies and
sticking them in our bonnets. They sat very still among our bows of
riband, and really served our purpose very well.
Bad news awaited us at home; news of Mr. Van Buren's casting vote in
favour of the third reading of the Gag Bill, and of a fresh breaking out
of the dreadful Creek war in Georgia; but now that that atrocious bill
has long been thrown out, and the Creek war ended (though with grievous
suffering and humiliation to the poor Creeks), this day of delicious
dawdling (a word which Dr. F. by this time completely understood) stands
out bright enough to be worthy of the scene and of our human life.
PRIESTLEY.
"Ingrata Patria!"
DANTE'S _Epitaph_.
"Que l'homme donc s'estime son prix: il a en lui la capacité de
connôitre la vérité, et d'être heureux: mais il n'a point de vérité,
ou constante, ou satisfaisante. Je voudrois donc porter l'homme a
désirer d'en trouver: à être prêt et dégagé des passions pour la
suivre où il la trouvera."--PASCAL.
Among the select classes of men to whom the common race looks up with
the heart-throb of mingled reverence and sympathy, none is perhaps so
eminent as that of sufferers for opinion. If ever we are conscious of a
breathing of the Godhead in man, it is in the sanctified presence,
actual or ideal, of martyrs to truth. Such men, as a class, are liable
to particular faults, are usually marked by the imperfections which
attend their virtues, as shadows are a consequence of sunshine. But in
no case are men in general so tolerant of faults as in theirs; I do not
mean in their own day, when they are not commonly recognised as
confessors and martyrs, but when they stand out from the records of
time, complete characters in history. The turbulence, jealousy, and
self-will of such men are allowed for more liberally than the same
faults in other orders of men; more slightly noticed; more eagerly
extenuated. And why? Because, of all men, they most infallibly and
extensively command sympathy. As truth is the one eternal good, the
single pursuit of truth is the one eternal virtue which wins and
elevates all human souls. But when, as in some rare instances, this
devotion to truth is seen purified from the failings which elsewhere
seem its natural accompaniments; when the hero is seen holy, harmless,
and undefiled as the sage; when no regrets need mingle with the
admiration of the disciple, as delicious a contemplation is afforded to
the moral taste as the moral creation yields.
Such was Priestley, the singled-minded martyr, but the meek inquirer;
the intrepid confessor, but the humble Christian; the gentle
philosopher, the sympathizing friend. Circumstances have been
unfavourable to a wide, but not to a full knowledge of his character.
The comparatively few to whom his mind and heart have been absolutely
laid open, regard him with a love which is only not idolatrous because
it is perfectly reasonable. The many know him as a man who was driven
away from Birmingham by a mob who destroyed his house, papers, and
philosophical apparatus, burned his church, and sought his life; and
that he took refuge in America, and died there. Some go on to believe
what was said at the time; that he was a turbulent man, a
mischief-maker, and either a conceited smatterer in theology and
philosophy, or a deep malignant infidel, they do not know which. Others
hold him to have been a good kind of man, who rashly drew upon his own
head the tempests of his time, and had to bear only the natural though
hard consequences of his own imprudence. But those whose knowledge of
him is complete can tell that his imputed turbulence was intellectual
activity; his conceit a simplicity too lofty for the apprehension of his
enemies; his infidelity a devout constancy to truth. His depth was all
of wisdom; his hatreds were of cant, hypocrisy, and designed obstruction
of truth. He exposed himself to tribulation as innocently and
unconsciously as he bore it meekly and heroically. He never sought
martyrdom, for he loved life and its comforts in the bosom of his family
and friends; he valued repose for his philosophical pursuits, and
thought his daily probation sufficient for every man's strength. He was
playing backgammon with his wife after supper when the mob came upon
him; he was so wholly unprepared that his MSS. and private letters lay
all exposed to the rioters; and the philosopher suffered--calmly and
bravely suffered--the anguish of feeling himself a hated and an injured
man. Yet, thus taken by surprise, his emotions were not for himself, or
for the many near and dear friends who were being overwhelmed with him.
While he stood looking over a garden hedge where he could see the flames
devouring his church, and hear the shouts of the mob which was
demolishing his house, he dropped a natural expression of pity for the
misery of those poor people when they should discover what mischief they
had done. No word was ever heard from him about the effect which the
sufferings of the day would have upon anybody's mind or upon any future
time. He simply did the duty, and bore the probation of the hour,
leaving unconsciously an example of sublime patience which has raised
and kindled more minds than the highest order of good men ever dream of
influencing, and whose force will not be spent while men are moved by
disinterestedness or thrilled by heroism.
Of his retirement in America we have many particulars, but still not
enough. Enough can never be learned of the course of life of one whose
more homely virtues were now put to the severest test, after those which
are commonly esteemed more lofty had well stood their trial. The
following passage delivers over to us the impression of the
philosopher's latter days, which Priestley's own correspondence and the
notices of his friends leave on the mind of an affectionate admirer of
the man.
"There, in one of its remote recesses, on the outer margin of
civilization, he who had made a part of the world's briskest activity,
who had led on the speed of its progress, whose mind had kept pace with
its learning, and overtaken its science, and outstripped its freedom and
its morality, gathered together his resources of philosophy and
devotion; thence he looked forth on the vicissitudes and prospects of
Europe with melancholy but hopeful interests, like the prophet from his
mount on the land whose glories he was not to see. But it was not for
such an energetic spirit as his to pass instantaneously into the
quietude of exile without an irrecoverable shock. He had not that dreamy
and idle pietism which could enwrap itself in the mists of its own
contemplations, and believe Heaven nearer in proportion as earth became
less distinct. The shifting sights and busy murmurs that reached him
from afar reminded him of the circulation of social toils which had
plied his hand and heart. Year after year passed on, and brought him no
summons of duty back into the stir of men; all that he did he had to
devise and execute by his own solitary energies, apart from advice and
sympathy, and with no hope but that of benefiting the world he was soon
to leave. The effort to exchange the habits of the city for those of the
cloister was astonishingly successful. But his mind was never the same
again; it is impossible not to perceive a decline of power, a tendency
to garrulity of style and eccentricity of speculation in his American
publications. And yet, while this slight though perceptible shade fell
over his intellect, a softened light seemed to spread itself over his
character. His feelings, his moral perceptions were mellowed and ripened
by years, and assumed a tenderness and refinement not observable before.
Thanks to the genial and heavenly clime which Christianity sheds round
the soul, the aged stem burst into blossom. And so it will always be
when the mind is really pervaded by so noble a faith as Priestley's.
There is no law of nature, there are no frosts of time to shed a
snowblight on the heart. The feelings die out when their objects come to
an end; and if there be no future, and the aims of life become shorter
and shorter, and its treasures drop off, and its attractions are spent,
and a few links only of its hours remain in the hand, well may there be
no heart for effort and no eye for beauty, and well may love gather
itself up to die. But open perfection to its veneration and immortality
to its step; tell it of one who is and always will be the inspirer of
genius, the originator of truth, the life of emotion; assure it that all
which is loved shall live for ever; that that which is known shall
enlarge for ever; that all which is felt shall grow intenser for ever,
and the proximity of death will quicken instead of withering the mind;
the eye will grow dim on the open page of knowledge; the hand will be
found clasping in death the instruments of human good; the heart's last
pulse will beat with some new emotion of benignity. In Priestley's case
there was not merely a sustainment, but a positive advancement of
character in later years. The symptoms of restlessness gradually
disappear without abatement of his activity; a quietude as of one who
waits and listens comes over him; there are touches of sentiment and
traces of tears in his letters, and yet an obvious increase of serenity
and hope; there is a disposition to devise and accomplish more good for
the world, and ply himself while an energy remained, and yet no anxiety
to do what was beyond his powers. He successively followed to the grave
a son and a wife; and the more he was left alone, the more did he love
to be alone; and in his study, surrounded by the books which had been
his companions for half a century and over half the earth, and sitting
beneath the pictures of friends under the turf, he took his last survey
of the world which had given him so long a shelter; like a grateful
guest before his departure, he numbered up the bright and social, or the
adventurous hours which had passed during his stay; and the philosophers
who had welcomed him in his annual visits to London, the broad,
sagacious face of Franklin, the benignant intelligence of Price, rose up
before him, and the social voices of the group of heretics round the
fireside of Essex-street floated on his ear; and as the full moon shone
upon his table and glistened in his electrical machine, his eye would
dream of the dining philosophers of the Lunar Society, and glisten to
greet again the doughty features of Darwin, and the clear, calculating
eye of Watt. Yet his retrospective thoughts were but hints to suggest a
train of prospective far more interesting. The scenes which he loved
were in the past, but most of the objects which clothed them with
associations of interest were already transferred to the future: there
they were in reserve for him, to be recovered (to use his own favourite
phrase, slightly tinged with the melancholy spirit of his solitude)
'under more favourable circumstances;' and thither, with all his
attachment to the world, whose last cliffs he had reached, and whose
boundary ocean already murmured beneath, he hoped soon to emigrate."[7]
Footnote 7: "Monthly Repository," New Series, vol. vii., p. 235.