This noble line is worthily sustained by mighty pillars of alternate emerald and marble. The famous green loses nothing, as you may imagine, on a nearer view. A green more gorgeously cool and pure it is impossible to conceive. It is to the vulgar greens of earth what the blue of a summer sky is to our mundane azures, and is, in fact, as sacred, as remote, as impalpable as that. You can fancy it the parent-green, the head-spring of color to all the verdant water-caves and all the clear, sub-fluvial haunts and bowers of naiads and mermen in all the streams of the earth. The lower half of the watery wall is shrouded in the steam of the boiling gulf—a veil never rent nor lifted. At its core, this eternal cloud seems fixed and still with excess of motion—still and intensely white; but, as it rolls and climbs against its lucent cliff, it tosses little whiffs and fumes and pants of snowy smoke, which betray the furious tumult of its dazzling womb. In the middle of the curve, at the apex of the gulf, the converging walls are ground into finest powder, and hence arises a huge mist-column, and fills the upper air with its hovering drift. Its summit far overtops the crest of the cataract, and, as you look down along the rapids above, you see it hanging over the averted gulf like some far-flowing ensign of danger. Of these things some vulgar verbal hint may be attempted; but what words can render the rarest charm of all—the clear-cut brow of the Fall, the very act and figure of the leap, the rounded turn of the horizontal to the perpendicular? To call it simple seems a florid over-statement. Anything less combined and complicated never appealed to the admiration of men. It is carved clean as an emerald, as one must say and say again. It arrives, it pauses, it plunges; it comes and goes for ever; it melts and shifts and changes, all with the sound as of a thousand thunderbolts; and yet its pure outline never lapses by a bubble’s value from its constant calm. It is as gentle as the pouring of wine from a flagon—of melody from the lip of a singer. From the little grove beside the American Fall you catch superbly—better than you are able to do at the Horseshoe—the very profile of this full-flooded bend. If the line of beauty had vanished from the earth elsewhere, it would survive on this classic forehead. It is impossible to insist too strongly on the prodigious elegance of the great Fall, as seen from the Canada cliff. You fancy that the genius who contrived it was verily the prime author of the truth that order, measure, and symmetry are the conditions of perfect beauty. He applied his faith among the watching and listening forests, long before the Greeks proclaimed theirs in the shining masonry of the Acropolis. Rage, confusion, chaos, are grandly absent; dignity, grace, and leisure ride upon the crest; it flows without haste, without rest, with the measured majesty of a motion whose rhythm is attuned to eternity. Even the roll of the white batteries at the base seems fixed and poised and ordered, and in the vague middle zone of difference between falling flood and rising cloud you imagine a mystical meaning—the passage of body to soul, of matter to spirit, of human to divine.

Goat Island, of which every one has heard, is the great menagerie of lions, and the spot where your single stone—or, in plain prose, your half-dollar—kills most birds. This broad insular strip, which performs the excellent office of withholding the American shore from immediate contact with the Fall, has been allowed to remain a very proper piece of wildness, and here you may ramble, for the most part, in undiverted contemplation. The island is owned, I believe, by a family of co-heritors, who have the good taste to preserve it intact. More than once, however, as I have been told, they have been offered a huge price for the privilege of building a hotel upon this sacred soil. They have been wise, but, after all, they are human, and the offer may be made once too often. Before this fatal day dawns, why shouldn’t the State buy up the precious acres, as California has done the Yo-Semite? It is the opinion of a sentimental tourist that no price would be too great to pay. Otherwise, the only hope for their integrity is in the possibility of a shrewd prevision on the part of the gentlemen who know how to keep hotels that the music of the dinner-band would be injured by the roar of the cataract. You approach from Goat Island the left abutment of the Horseshoe. The little tower which, with the classic rainbow, figures in all “views” of the scene, is planted at a dozen feet from the shore, directly on the shoulder of the Fall. This little tower, I think, deserves a compliment.