One might have said beforehand that it would never do, but, as it stands, it is incontestably picturesque. It serves as a unit of appreciation of the scale of things, and from its spray-blackened summit it admits you to an almost downward peep into the green gulf. More here, even, than on the Canada edge, you perceive how the great spectacle is wrought all in water. Its substantial floods take on at moments the likeness of walls and pillars and columns, and, to present any vivid picture of them, we are compelled to talk freely of emerald and crystal, of silver and marble. But really, all the simplicity of the Falls, and half their grandeur, reside in the fact that they are built clean of fluid elements, and that no rocky staging or earthy commixture avail to complicate and vulgarize them. They are water piled on water, pinned on water, hinging and hanging on water, breaking, crashing, whitening in mutual masses of water. And yet for all this no solid was ever solid like that sculptured shoulder of the Horseshoe! From this little tower, or, better still, from various points further along the island-shore, it seems indeed a watery world. Before you stretches the huge expanse of the upper river, with its belittled cliffs, now mere black lines of forest, dull as with the sadness of gazing at eternal storm. Anything more horribly desolate than this boundless livid welter of the rapids it is impossible to conceive, and you very soon begin to pay it the tribute of your terror, in the impulse to people it with human forms. On this theme you can spin endless romances. Yes, they are alive, every fear-blanched billow and eddy of them—alive and frenzied with the sense of their doom. They see below them that nameless pause of the arrested current, and the high-tossed drift of sound and spray which rises up lamenting, like the ghosts of their murdered brothers. They shriek, they sob, they clasp their white hands and toss their long hair; they cling and clutch and wrestle, and, above all, they bite. Especially tragical is the air they have of being forced backward, with averted faces, to their fate. Every portion of the flood is like the grim stride of a giant, wading huge-kneed to his purpose, with the white teeth of a victim fastened in his neck. The outermost of three small islands, interconnected by short bridges, at the extremity of this shore, places one in singularly intimate relation with this portentous flurry. To say that hereabouts the water leaps and plunges and rears and dives, that its uproar deadens the thunder, and its swiftness distances the lightning, is to say all that we can, and yet but a tithe of what we should. Nowhere surely in the wide world is water handled with such a masterly knowledge of effect.

The great spectacle may be called complete only when you have gone down the river some four miles, on the American side, to the so-called rapids of the Whirlpool. Here the unhappy stream tremendously renews its trouble. Two approaches have been contrived on the cliff—one to the rapids proper, the other, further below, to the scene of the sudden bend. The first consists of a little wooden cage, of the “elevator” pattern, which slides up and down a gigantic perpendicular shaft of horrible flimsiness. But a couple of the usual little brides, staggering beneath the weight of gorgeous cashmeres, entered the conveyance with their respective consorts at the same time with myself; and, as it thus carried Hymen and his fortunes, we survived the adventure. You obtain from below—that is, on the shore of the river—a specimen of as noble cliff-scenery as the continent can afford. The green embankment at the base of the sheer red wall is by itself a very fair mountain-slope; and from this starts erect, rugged and raw, a grandly spacious lateral section of mother earth. As it stands, Gustave Doré might have drawn it. He would have sketched with especial ardor certain parasitical shrubs and boskages—lone and dizzy witnesses of autumn; certain outward-peering wens and warts and other perpendicular excrescences of rock; and, above all, near the summit, the fantastic figures of sundry audacious minor cliffs, grafted upon the greater by a mere lateral attachment and based in the empty air, with great lone trees rooted on their verges, like the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence. The actual whirlpool is a third of a mile further down the river, and is best seen from the cliff above. Thus seen, it seems to me by all odds the finest of the secondary episodes of the Niagara drama, and one on which a scribbling tourist, ineffectively playing at showman, may be content to ring down his curtain. The channel at this point turns away to the right, at a clean right-angle, and the river, arriving from the rapids just above with stupendous velocity, meets the hollow elbow of the Canada shore. The movement with which it betrays its surprise and bewilderment—the sudden issueless maze of waters—is, I think, after the Horseshoe Fall, the superbest thing in its progress.