We cannot build about Niagara with walls and a roof, nor girdle it with a palisade, but the sentimental tourist may muse upon the chances of its being guarded by the negative homage of empty spaces and absent barracks and decent forbearance. The actual abuse of the scene belongs evidently to that immense class of iniquities which are destined to grow very much worse in order to grow a very little better. The good humor engendered by the main spectacle bids you suffer it to run its course.

Though hereabouts so much is great, distances are small, and a ramble of two or three hours enables you to gaze hither and thither from a dozen standpoints. The one you are likely to choose first is that on the Canada cliff, something above the suspension bridge. The great fall faces you, enshrined in the surging increase of its own resounding mists. The common feeling just here, I believe, is one of disappointment at its want of height; the vision grasps less in quantity than it had been prompted to expect. My own sense, I confess, was absolutely gratified from the first; and, indeed, not the bulk and volume of the matter, but its exquisite expression, seemed to me paramount. You are, moreover, at some distance, and you feel that with the lessening interval you will not be cheated of your chance to be dizzied with pure size. Already you see the world-famous green, baffling painters, baffling poets, clear and lucid on the lip of the precipice; the more so, of course, for the clouds of silver and snow into which it drops transformed. The whole picture before you is admirably simple. The Horseshoe gleams and glares and boils and smokes from the centre to the right, drumming itself dim with vapors; in the centre, the dark pedestal of Goat Island divides the double flood; to the left booms and smokes the minor thunder of the American Fall; and, on a level with the eye, above the still crest of either cataract, appear the white faces of the uttermost rapids. The circle of weltering froth at the base of the Horseshoe, emerging from the dead white vapors—absolute white, as moonless midnight is absolute black—which muffle impenetrably the final crash of the plunge, melts slowly into the powerful green of the lower river. It seems a mighty drama in itself, this blanched survival and recovery of the stream. It stretches away like a tired swimmer, struggling from the snowy scum and the silver drift, and passing slowly from an eddying foam-sheet, touched with green lights, to a cold stony green, streaked and marbled with trails and wild arabesques of foam. This is the beginning of that air of unforgotten trouble which marks the river as you meet it at the lake. The ultimate green I speak of is of admirable hue—the clearest, the greenest, the coldest of all greens—a green as sombre and steady as most greens are light and inconstant. So it shifts along, with a sort of measured pride, deep and lucid, and yet of immense body, the most stately, the least turbid of torrents. Its movement, its sweep, and progression are as admirable as its color, but as little as its color to be made a matter of words. These things are but part of a spectacle in which nothing is imperfect. As you draw nearer and nearer, on the Canada cliff, to the right arm of the Horseshoe, the mass begins in all conscience to be large enough. You are able at last to stand on the very cope of the shelf from which the leap is taken, bathing your boot-toes, if you like, in the side-ooze of the glassy curve. I may say, in parenthesis, that the importunities one suffers here, amid the central din of the cataract, from hackmen and photographers and venders of gimcracks, are simply hideous and infamous. The road is lined with little drinking-shops and warehouses, and from these retreats their occupants dart forth in competition upon the hapless traveller with talk of their pigmy sideshows. I can but ask—need such things be? You purchase release at last by a great outlay of the small coin of dogged “No’s,” and stand steeped in long looks at the most beautiful object in the world.

II.

The pure beauty of elegance and grace is the grand characteristic of the Fall. It is not in the least monstrous. It is supremely artistic—a harmony, a conception, a masterpiece; it beats Michael Angelo. One may seem at first to say the least, but the delicate observer will admit that one says the most, in saying that it is pleasing. There are, however, so many more things to say about it—its multitudinous features crowd so upon the vision as one looks—that it seems absurd for me to attempt to handle details. The main feature, perhaps, is the incomparable loveliness of the immense line of the river and its lateral abutments. It neither falters, nor breaks, nor stiffens, but maintains grandly from wing to wing its consummate curve.