8

our eyes, as we gasp, for the curve of the Fall, for the parapet above,-and in a sudden break of the cloud, through which breathes cold the very air of the rush of waters, we catch a glorious glimpse of a calm ocean pouring white and resistless from the blue sky above into the white clouds below, and behold the very image of that Mind's process whose might

"Moves on

His undisturbed affairs."

I glance backward upon the deck, which is raked by the scudding gusts of spray, and see a line of wet men crouching together, like a group of Esquimaux, with their faces upturned toward the Fall. They sit motionless, and staring, and appalled, like a troop in Dante's Inferno. But straight before us-good Heaven! pilot, close under the bow there, looming through the mist! Are you blind? are you mad? or does the Cataract mock our feeble power, and will claim its victims? A black rock, ambushed in the surge and spray, lowers before us. We are driving straight upon it; we all see it, but we do not speak. We fancy that the boat will not obey--that the due fate will reward this terrific trifling. Straight before us, a boat's length away, and lo! swerving with the current around the rock, on and farther, with felicitous daring, the little "Maid of the Mist" dances up to the very foot of the

Falls, wrapping herself saucily in the rainbow robe of its own mist. There we tremble, in perfect security, mocking with our little Maid the might of Niagara. For man is the magician, and as he plants his foot upon the neck of mountains, and passes the awful Alps, safely as the Israelites through the divided sea, so he dips his hand into Niagara, and gathering a few drops from its waters, educes a force from Niagara itself, by which he confronts and defies it. The very water which as steam was moving us to the Cataract, had plunged over it as spray a few hours before.

Or go, some bright morning down the Biddle staircase, and creeping along under the cliff, change your dress at the little house by the separate sheet of the American Fall. The change made, we shall reappear like exhausted firemen, or Swampscot fishermen. Some of us will not insist upon our "bunnets," but will lay them aside, and join the dilapidated firemen and fishermen outside the house, as Bloomerized Undines, mermaids, or naiads. A few descending steps of rock, and we have reached the perpendicular wooden staircase that leads under the Fall. Do not stop; do not pause to look affrighted down into that whirring cauldron of cold mist, where the winds dart, blinding, in arrowy gusts. Now we see the platform across the bottomnow a cloud of mist blots it out. And it roars so.

. Come, fishermen, mermaids, naiads, firemen and

nines, down, down: Ching to the railing! Lean me Than gossamer blossom which the softest

zephyr wanii trill, whither will these mad beneath the Cataract whirl thee! We are here arrow platform; it is railed upon each side, truns dash like sleet, like acute ha against The swart sweep of the water ass the stas ais into the yawning gut beyond

w:: urins, we move securray as n Az: now as for you stand üretiy

1 are we directly under the Fall. *t ja hallange, JC the round pebbles on the

siding water as in the

on's there You may see the

within another. For Nga

If her lovers-rewards of beat

erans silence as the proud o

overhanging shel: of rock.

cold and wet, vor St

1ys a lonely cave ceartamer

for ever. And if stil

your daring is untamed, you may climb over slippery rocks in the blinding mist and the deafening roar, and feel yourself as far under the Great American Fall as human foot may venture.

I must stop. If you have been at Niagara, what I have written may recall it, but can hardly paint, except to remembrance, the austere grandeur and dreamy beauties which are its characteristics. Your few days there are days upon the river bank, walking and wondering. Your frail fancies of it are swallowed up as they rise, like chance flowers flung upon its current. Many a man to whom Niagara has been a hope, and an inspiration, and who has stood before its majesty awe-stricken and hushed, secretly wonders that its words describing it are not pictures and poems. But any great natural object—a cataract, an Alp, a storm at sea—are seed too vast for any sudden flowering. They lie in experience moulding life. At length the pure peaks of noble aims and the broad flow of a generous manhood betray that in some happy hour of youth you have seen the Alps and Niagara.