Instead of a unity, I found Niagara manifold, varying as one wanders about the banks. The channel here is worthy of the stream. It is cut into precipitous cliffs, picturesque rocks, forests of trees, bridges, hotels and other houses. In photographs and engravings, there is often but a tame outline, with which the reality does not correspond. Of the upper and lower Rapids, I prefer the former in one respect; it gives good views of the foliage which fringes the water. Emphatically, one may use the word _beauty_ in reference to the landscape as distinguished from the Rapids. Colours are charming—greens of all tints; at sunset streaks of pink, violet, lavender, lilac, along the edge of the Falls; azure tints in the river; sky with crimson and purple flushes at eventide.
At the expense of repetition, I will quote the words I find in my notebook written on a rocky bank:—“Opposite, looking west, is the Canada side, skirted by thick trees, forming a continuous border—the Horse Shoe form of a rocky ledge, crossed by the sweep of water, would measure the third of a mile. It still resembles a ridge of emerald, tinged, or rather lined, with white. Then the flood plunges down, to rise again from the bottom in columns of vapour. In sunshine the whole is crossed by a wonderful rainbow. Then, afterwards, it appeared to me like an altar of frosted silver, spanning the end of a temple choir, sending up incense for ever and ever! Looking down into the precipitous gulf, formed by the Canadian and American shores, one sees the river flowing on steadily like a shifting floor of variegated marble,—green, streaked with white. I shift my position, walking under the trees of Goat Island, about a quarter of a mile from the Horse Shoe, and sit upon a bit of tableland, forming what is called Lunar Island,—dividing into two unequal limbs the watery flood. At the bottom appears another rainbow. I shift again, walking up the Goat Island, and cross a bridge over Rapids, and then enter the grounds called (as just said) Prospect Park; and there one faces both cataracts—the American in profile, the Horse Shoe full face.”
A suspension bridge crosses the whirling waters on which it makes one giddy to look down. Then occurs a turn, where a whirlpool is formed, and pieces of timber are swept round and round by enormous eddies. Four days I spent at these never-to-be-forgotten spots filled with marvels of Divine creation.