Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1892 — NIAGARA FALLS. [ARTICLE]

NIAGARA FALLS.

Description of the Famous Haver bj Sir i Edwin Arnold. The Mighthy Torrent, Thundering, Smoking, Guttering It Fasted Before Him—A Bight to Dwell and Linger in the Kind Forever. Before the balcony in which this is written the groat cataract of America is thundering, smoking, glittering with green and white rollers and rapids, hurling the waters of a whole continent iri splendor ami speed over the sharp ledgos of the long, brown rock by which Erie “the Broad" 1 steps proudly down to Ontario ‘‘the seautifui.” says Sir Edwin Arnold in the London Telegraph. Close at hand on opr left—not indeed further than some 600 or 700 yards—tho smaller, but very imposiug. Amcriinan Falls speaks with tho louder voice of the two, beoauso its coiling spirals of twisted and furious flood crush in full' impulse of descent upon the talus of massive bowlders heaped up at its foot - The rebounding impact of water on rock. the clouds of water-smoko which nso high, in air, while the river below is churned into a whirling cream of eddy and surge and backwater, unite in a composite ©Sect, at once magnificent and bewildering. But if you listen attentively you will always hear tho profound diapason of the groat fall—tha t surnamod the Ho rseshoo—sound ing /

superbly amid the loudest clamor and tumult of its sister, a deeper and grander note; and whenever for a time the gaze rests with inexhaustible) wonder upon that fierce and tumultuary American Falls, this mightier and still moro marvelous Horseshoe steals its way again with irresistible fascination. Full in front lies that wholly indescribable spectacle at this instant—~~lts solemn voice an octave lower than the excited, leapiug, almost angry cry of fervid life from the lessor cataract. — resounds through tho golden summer morning air like the distant roar from the streets of fifty Londons ail in full activity.

Far away, botween the dark-gray trees of Goat island aud the fir woods of the Canadian shore, the Niagara river is seen winding eagorly to its prodigious leap. You can discern, even from this balcony, tho line of the first brfeakors. Whore the Niagara river feels, across its whole breadth, tho fateful draw of the cataracts, whore its current seems suddenly to leap forward, stimulated by a mud desire, a hidden.-«peU, a dreadful and irresistible doom. You can noto far back along the gilded surface of tho upper stream how these lines of dancing, tossing, ougor, anxious and fate-im-pelling breakers and billows multiply their white ranks and spread and close together their leaping ridges into a wild chaos of racing waves as the brink is approached. And then, at the brink tho re is a curious pauso—the memerttary peace of tho irrevocable, Those mad upper waters —reaching the great leap—are suddenly all quiet and glassy and rounded and green as tho border of a field of rye, while they turn the angle of the dreadful ledge and hurl tlieinsolvcs into the snow-white gulf of noise and mist and mystery underneath. There is nothing more Iranslueontly groen, nor more purennially still and lovelier than Niagara tho Greater. At this her awful brink the whole aroliitravQ of the main abyss gleams like a fixed and glorious work wrought in polished aoquamarino or emerald. This exquisitely colored cornice of tho enormous waterfall this brim of

bright tranquility betwoon fervor of rush and fury of pluugo—is its principal feature, aud stamps it as far more beautiful than terrible. Indeed, the whole spectacle of the cataracts is one of delight and of deopostchurm, not by any melius of honor or of awe; since nowhere are the measureless forces of nature more tenderly revealed more softly and splendidly clad, more demurely constrained and between its stoop confines. Even the heart of the abyss, in the recess of the Horseshoe, whore tho waters of Erie and Superior clash together in tremendous conflict, the inner madness and miracle of which no eyo can see or ever will soe. by reason of the veils of milky spray tu.d of the rolling clouds of water-drift which forever hide it—oven this central solemnity and shudder-fraught miracle or tho monstrous uproar and glory is rendered requisite, reposeful ana soothing by the lovely rainbows hang over the turmoil and clamor. From its crest of cVysopraso and silver, indeed, to its broad foot of milky foam and of whitestunned waves, too broken find too dazed to begin at first to lloat away, Niagara appears not terrible, but divinely and deliciously graceful,’ glad and lovely—a specimen of the splendor of water at its finest—asight to dwell aud linger in the mind with ineffaceable images of happy and grateful thought, by no means to affect it either in act or seeing, or to haunt it in future days of memory, with any wild rominitconco of torror or of gloom.