I had the same eagerness in stepping upon the cars at Buffalo. Within a certain circumference every body is Niagarized, and flies in a frenzy to the centre as filings to the magnet. Before the train stopped, and while I fancied that we were slackening speed for a way-station-I, listening the while to the pleasant music of words, that weaned my hearing from any roar of waters—a crowd of men leaped from the cars, and ran like thieves, lovers, soldiers, or what you will, to the "Cataract," as the conductor said. I looked upon them at once as a select party of poets, overwhelmed by the enthusiastic desire to see the Falls. It was an error: they were "knowing ones," intent upon the first choice of rooms at the "Cataract House." I followed them, and found a queue, as at the box-office of the opera in Paris-a long train of travellers waiting to enter their names. Not one could have a room yet, (it was ten o'clock,) but at half-past two every body was going away, and then every body could be accommodated.

-And meanwhile?

-Meanwhile, Niagara.

Disappointment in Niagara seems to be affected, or childish. Your fancies may be very different, but the regal reality sweeps them away like weeds and dreams. You may have nourished some impossible idea of one ocean pouring itself over a precipice into

D*

another. But it was a wild whim of inexperience, and is in a moment forgotten. If, standing upon the bridge as you cross to Goat Island, you can watch the wild sweep and swirl of the waters around the wooded point above, dashing, swelling and raging, but awful from the inevitable and resistless rush, and not feel that your fancy of a sea is paled by the chaos of wild water that tumbles toward you, then you are a child, and the forms of your thought are not precise enough for the profoundest satisfaction in great natural spectacles.

Over that bridge how slowly you will walk, and how silently, gazing in awe at the tempestuous sweep of the rapids, and glancing with wonder at the faint cloud of spray over the American Fall. As the sense of grandeur and beauty subdues your mind, you will still move quietly onward, pausing a moment, leaning a moment on the railing, closing your eyes to hear only Niagara, and ever, as a child says its prayers in a time of danger, slowly, and with strange slowness, repeating to yourself, "Niagara ! Niagara !"

For although you have not yet seen the Cataract, you feel that nothing else can be the crisis of this excitement. Were you suddenly placed blindfolded where you stand, and your eyes were unbandaged, and you were asked, "What shall be the result of all

this?" the answer would accompany the question, "Niagara !"

Yet marvellous calmness still waits upon intense feeling. "It was odd," wrote Sterling to a friend, "to be curiously studying the figures on the doctor's vaistcoat, while my life, as I thought, was bleeding rom my lips." We must still sport with our emotions. Some philosopher will die, his last breath sparkling from his lips in a pun. Some fair and fated Lady Jane Grey will span her slight neck with her delicate fingers, and smile to the headsman that his task is easy. And we, with kindred feeling, turn aside into the shop of Indian curiosities and play with Niagara, treating it as a jester, as a Bayadere, to await our pleasure.

Then, through the woods on Goat Island-solemn and stately woods-how slowly you will walk, again, and how silently! Ten years ago, your friend carved his name upon some tree there, and Niagara must now wait until he finds it, swollen and shapeless with time. You saunter on. It is not a sunny day. It is cloudy, but the light is moist and rich, and when you emerge upon the quiet green path that skirts the English Rapids, the sense of life in the waters-the water as a symbol of life and human passion-fills your mind. Certainly no other water in the world is watched with such anxiety, with such sympathy.

The belplessness of its frenzied sweep saddens your heart. It is dark, fateful, foreboding. At times, as if a wild despair had seized it and rent it, it seethes, and struggles, and dashes foam-like into the air. Not with kindred passion do you regard it, but sadly, with folded hands of resignation, as you watch the death struggles of a hero. It sweeps away as you look, dark, and cold, and curling, and the seething you saw, before your thought is shaped, is an eddy of foam in the Niagara River below.

As yet you have not seen the Fall. You are coming with its waters, and are at its level. But groups of persons, sitting upon yonder point, which we see through the trees, are looking at the Cataract. We do not panse for them; we run now, down the path,

along the bridges, into the Tower, and lean far over where the spray cools our faces. The living water of the rapids moves to its fall, as if torpid with ter ror; and the river that we saw, in one vast volume now pours over the parapet, and makes Niagara. It is not all stricken into foam as it falls, but the densest mass is smooth, and almost of livid green.

Yet, even as it plunges, see how curls of spray exude from the very substance of the mass, airy, sparkling and wreathing into mist-emblems of the water's resurrection into summer clouds. Looking over into the abyss, we behold nothing below, we hear only a slow, constant thunder; and, bewildered in the mist, dream that the Cataract has cloven the earth to its centre, and that, pouring its waters into the fervent inner heat, they hiss into spray, and overhang the fated Fall, the sweat of its agony.