University of Virginia Library

1. NO. I.—NIAGARA.

It was in my senior vacation, and I was bound to
Niagara for the first time. My companion was a specimen
of the human race found rarely in Vermount, and
never elsewhere. He was nearly seven feet high,
walked as if every joint in his body was in a hopeless
state of dislocation, and was hideously, ludicrously,
and painfully ugly. This whimsical exterior contained
the conscious spirit of Apollo, and the poetical susceptibility
of Keats. He had left his plough in the Green
mountains at the age of twenty-five, and entered as a
poor student at the university, where, with the usual
policy of the college government, he was allotted to
me as a compulsory chum, on the principle of breaking
in a colt with a cart-horse. I began with laughing
at him, and ended with loving him. He rejoiced in
the common appellation of Job Smith—a synonymous
soubriquet, as I have elsewhere remarked, which was
substituted by his classmates for his baptismal name
of Forbearance.

Getting Job away with infinite difficulty from a
young Indian girl who was selling moccasins in the
streets of Buffalo (a straight, slender creature of eighteen,
stepping about like a young leopard, cold, stern,
and beautiful), we crossed the outlet of Lake Erie at
the ferry, and took horses on the northern bank of
Niagara river to ride to the falls. It was a noble
stream, as broad as the Hellespont and as blue as the
sky, and I could not look at it, hurrying on headlong
to its fearful leap, without a feeling almost of dread.

There was only one thing to which Job was more
susceptible than to the beauties of nature, and that
was the beauty of woman. His romance had been
stirred by the lynx-eyed Sioux, who took her money
for the moccasins with such haughty and thankless
superbia, and full five miles of the river, with all the
gorgeous flowers and rich shrubs upon its rim, might
as well have been Lethe for his admiration. He rode
along, like the man of rags you see paraded on an ass
in the carnival, his legs and arms dangling about in
ludicrous obedience to the sidelong hitch of his pacer.

The roar of the falls was soon audible, and Job's
enthusiasm and my own, if the increased pace of our
Narraganset ponies meant anything, were fully aroused.
The river broke into rapids, foaming furiously on its

course, and the subterranean thunder increased like a
succession of earthquakes, each louder than the last.
I had never heard a sound so broad and universal. It
was impossible not to suspend the breath, and feel absorbed,
to the exclusion of all other thoughts, in the
great phenomenon with which the world seemed trembling
to its centre. A tall, misty cloud, changing its
shape continually, as it felt the shocks of the air, rose
up before us, and with our eyes fixed upon it, and our
horses at a hard gallop, we found ourselves unexpectedly
in front of a vast white — hotel! which suddenly
interposed between the cloud and our vision.
Job slapped his legs against the sides of his panting
beast, and urged him on, but a long fence on either
side the immense building cut him off from all approach;
and having assured ourselves that there was
no access to Niagara except through the back-door of
the gentleman's house, who stood with hat off to receive
us, we wished no good to his majesty's province
of Upper Canada, and dismounted.

“Will you visit the falls before dinner, gentlemen?”
asked mine host.

“No, sir!” thundered Job, in a voice that, for a moment,
stopped the roar of the cataract.

He was like an improvisatore who had been checked
by some rude birbone in the very crisis of his eloquence.
He would not have gone to the falls that
night to have saved the world. We dined.

As it was the first meal we had ever eaten under a
monarchy, I proposed the health of the king; but Job
refused it. There was an impertinent profanity, he
said, in fencing up the entrance to Niagara that was a
greater encroachment on natural liberty than the stamp
act. He would drink to no king or parliament under
which such a thing could be conceived possible. I left
the table and walked to the window.

“Job, come here! Miss —, by all that is lovely!”

He flounced up, like a snake touched with a torpedo,
and sprang to the window. Job had never seen
the lady whose name produced such a sensation, but
he had heard more of her than of Niagara. So had
every soul of the fifteen millions of inhabitants between
us and the gulf of Mexico. She was one of those miracles
of nature that occur, perhaps, once in the rise
and fall of an empire—a woman of the perfect beauty
of an angel, with the most winning human sweetness
of character and manner. She was kind, playful, unaffected,
and radiantly, gloriously beautiful. I am sorry
I may not mention her name, for in more chivalrous
times she would have been a character of history.
Everybody who has been in America, however, will
know who I am describing, and I am sorry for those
who have not. The country of Washington will be
in its decadence before it sees such another.

She had been to the fall and was returning with her
mother and a troop of lovers, who, I will venture to
presume, brought away a very imperfect impression of
the scene. I would describe her as she came laughing
up that green bank, unconscious of everything but
the pleasure of life in a summer sunset; but I leave it
for a more skilful hand. The authoress of “Hope
Leslie” will, perhaps, mould her image into one of
her inimitable heroines.

I presented my friend, and we passed the evening
in her dangerous company. After making an engagement
to accompany her in the morning behind the
sheet of the fall, we said “Good-night” at twelve—one
of us at least as many “fathom deep in love” as a thousand
Rosalinds. My poor chum! The roar of the
cataract that shook the very roof over thy head was
less loud to thee that night than the beating of thine
own heart, I warrant me!

I rose at sunrise to go alone to the fall, but Job was
before me, and the angular outline of his gaunt figure,
stretching up from Table Rock in strong relief against
the white body of the spray, was the first object that
caught my eye as I descended.

As I came nearer the fall, a feeling of disappointment
came over me. I had imagined Niagara a vast
body of water descending as if from the clouds. The
approach to most falls is from below, and we get an
idea of them as of rivers pitching down to the plain
from the brow of a hill or mountain. Niagara river,
on the contrary, comes out from Lake Erie through a
flat plain. The top of the cascade is ten feet perhaps
below the level of the country around—consequently
invisible from any considerable distance. You walk
to the bank of a broad and rapid river, and look over
the edge of a rock, where the outlet flood of an inland
sea seems to have broken through the crust of the
earth, and, by its mere weight, plunged with an awful
leap into an immeasurable and resounding abyss. It
seems to strike and thunder upon the very centre of
the world, and the ground beneath your feet quivers
with the shock till you feel unsafe upon it.

Other disappointment than this I can not conceive
at Niagara. It is a spectacle so awful, so beyond the
scope and power of every other phenomenon in the
world, that I think people who are disappointed there
mistake the incapacity of their own conception for the
want of grandeur in the scene.

The “hell of waters” below need but a little red
ochre to out-Phlegethon Phlegethon. I can imagine
the surprise of the gentle element, after sleeping away
a se'nnight of moonlight in the peaceful bosom of
Lake Erie, at finding itself of a sudden in such a coil!
A Mediterranean sea-gull, which had tossed out the
whole of a January in the infernal “yeast” of the
Archipelago (was I not all but wrecked every day between
Troy and Malta in a score of successive hurricanes?)—I
say, the most weather-beaten of sea-birds
would look twice before he ventured upon the roaring
caldron below Niagara. It is astonishing to see how
far the descending mass is driven under the surface of
the stream. As far down toward Lake Ontario as the
eye can reach, the immense volumes of water rise
like huge monsters to the light, boiling and flashing
out in rings of foam, with an appearance of rage and
anger that I have seen in no other cataract in the
world.

“A nice fall, as an Englishman would say, my dear
Job.”

“Awful!”

Halleck, the American poet (a better one never
“strung pearls”), has written some admirable verses
on Niagara, describing its effect on the different individuals
of a mixed party, among whom was a tailor.
The sea of incident that has broken over me in years
of travel, has washed out of my memory all but the
two lines descriptive of its impression upon Snip:—

“Shall we go to breakfast, Job?”

“How slowly and solemnly they drop into the
abysm!”

It was not an original remark of Mr. Smith's. Nothing
is so surprising to the observer as the extraordinary
deliberateness with which the waters of Niagara
take their tremendous plunge. All hurry and foam
and fret, till they reach the smooth limit of the curve
—and then the laws of gravitation seem suspended,
and, like Cesar, they pause, and determine, since it is
inevitable, to take the death-leap with becoming dignity.

“Shall we go to breakfast, Job?” I was obliged to
raise my voice, to be heard, to a pitch rather exhausting
to an empty stomach.

His eyes remained fixed upon the shifting rainbows
bending and vanishing in the spray. There was no
moving him, and I gave in for another five minutes.

“Do you think it probable, Job, that the waters of
Niagara strike on the axis of the world?”

No answer.

“Job!”

“What?”

“Do you think his majesty's half of the cataract is
finer than ours?”

“Much.”

“For water, merely, perhaps. But look at the delicious
verdure on the American shore, the glorious
trees, the massed foliage, the luxuriant growth even to
the very rim of the ravine! By Jove! it seems to me
things grow better in a republic. Did you ever see a
more barren and scraggy shore than the one you stand
upon?”

“How exquisitely,” said Job, soliloquizing, “that
small green island divides the fall! What a rock it
must be founded on, not to have been washed away
in the ages that these waters have split against it!”

“I'll lay you a bet it is washed away before the
year two thousand—payable in any currency with
which we may then be conversant.”

“Don't trifle!”

“With time, or geology, do you mean? Isn't it
perfectly clear from the looks of that ravine, that Niagara
has backed up all the way from Lake Ontario?
These rocks are not adamant, and the very precipice
you stand on has cracked, and looks ready for the
plunge.[1] It must gradually wear back to Lake Erie,
and then there will be a sweep, I should like to live
long enough to see. The instantaneous junction of
two seas, with a difference of two hundred feet in their
levels, will be a spectacle—eh, Job?”

“Tremendous!”

“Do you intend to wait and see it, or will you come
to breakfast?”

He was immoveable. I left him on the rock, went
up to the hotel and ordered mutton-chops and coffee,
and when they were on the table, gave two of the
waiters a dollar each to bring him up nolens-volens.
He arrived in a great rage, but with a good appetite,
and we finished our breakfast just in time to meet
Miss —, as she stepped like Aurora from her
chamber.

It is necessary to a reputation for prowess in the
United States to have been behind the sheet of the
fall (supposing you to have been to Niagara). This
achievement is equivalent to a hundred shower-baths,
one severe cold, and being drowned twice—but most
people do it.

We descended to the bottom of the precipice, at the
side of the fall, where we found a small house, furnished
with coarse linen dresses for the purpose, and
having arranged ourselves in habiliments not particularly
improving to our natural beauty, we reappeared—
only three out of a party of ten having had the courage
to trust their attractions to such a trial. Miss —
looked like a fairy in disguise, and Job like the most
ghostly and diabolical monster that ever stalked unsepultured
abroad. He would frighten a child in his
best black suit—but with a pair of wet linen trowsers
scarcely reaching to his knees, a jacket with sleeves
shrunk to the elbows, and a white cap, he was something
supernaturally awful. The guide hesitated
about going under the fall with him.

It looked rather appalling. Our way lay through a
dense descending sheet of water, along a slender
pathway of rocks, broken into small fragments, with
an overhanging wall on one side, and the boiling
caldron of the cataract on the other. A false step,
and you were a subject for the “shocking accident”
maker.

The guide went first, taking Miss —'s right
hand. She gave me her left, and Job brought up the
rear, as they say in Connecticut, “on his own hook.”
We picked our way boldly up to the water. The wall
leaned over so much, and the fragmented declivity
was so narrow and steep, that if it had not been done
before, I should have turned back at once. Two
steps more, and the small hand in mine began to struggle
violently, and, in the same instant, the torrent beat
into my eyes, mouth, and nostrils, and I felt as if I
was drowning. I staggered a blind step onward, but
still the water poured into my nostrils, and the conviction
rushed for a moment on my mind that we were
lost. I struggled for breath, stumbled forward, and
with a gasp that I thought was my last, sunk upon
the rocks within the descending waters. Job tumbled
over me the next instant, and as soon as I could clear
my eyes sufficiently to look about me, I saw the
guide sustaining Miss —, who had been as nearly
drowned as most of the subjects of the Humane Society,
but was apparently in a state of resuscitation.
None but the half-drowned know the pleasure of
breathing.

Here we were within a chamber that Undine might
have coveted, a wall of rock at our back, and a transparent
curtain of shifting water between us and the
world, having entitled ourselves à peu près to the same
reputation with Hylas and Leander, for seduction by
the Naiads.

Whatever sister of Arethusa inhabits there, we
could but congratulate her on the beauty of her abode.
A lofty and well-lighted hall, shaped like a long pavilion,
extended as far as we could see through the spray,
and with the two objections, that you could not have
heard a pistol at your ear for the noise, and that the
floor was somewhat precipitous, one could scarce imagine
a more agreeable retreat for a gentleman who
was disgusted with the world, and subject to dryness
of the skin. In one respect it resembled the enchanted
dwelling of the Witch of Atlas, where, Shelley tells
us—

It is lucky for Witches and Naiads that they are not
subject to rheumatism.

The air was scarcely breathable—(if air it may be
called, which streams down the face with the density
of a shower from a watering-pot), and our footing upon
the slippery rocks was so insecure, that the exertion
of continually wiping our eyes was attended with imminent
danger. Our sight was valuable, for surely,
never was such a brilliant curtain hung up to the sight
of mortals, as spread apparently from the zenith to our
feet, changing in thickness and lustre, but with a constant
and resplendent curve. It was what a child might
imagine the arch of the sky to be where it bends over
the edge of the horizon.

The sublime is certainly very much diluted when
one contemplates it with his back to a dripping and
slimy rock, and his person saturated with a continual
supply of water. From a dry window, I think the infernal
writhe and agony of the abyss into which we
were continually liable to slip, would have been as fine
a thing as I have seen in my travels; but I am free to
admit, that, at the moment, I would have exchanged
my experience and all the honor attached to it, for a
dry escape. The idea of drowning back through that
thick column of water, was at least a damper to enthusiasm.
We seemed cut off from the living. There
was a death between us and the vital air and sunshine.

I was screwing up my courage for the return, when
the guide seized me by the shoulder. I looked around,
and what was my horror to see Miss — standing
far in behind the sheet upon the last visible point of

rock, with the water pouring over her in torrents, and
a gulf of foam between us, which I could in no way
understand how she had passed over.

She seemed frightened and pale, and the guide explained
to me by signs (for I could not distinguish a
syllable through the roar of the cataract), that she had
walked over a narrow ledge, which had broken with
her weight. A long fresh mark upon the rock at the
foot of the precipitous wall, made it sufficiently evident:
her position was most alarming.

I made a sign to her to look well to her feet; for
the little island on which she stood was green with
slime and scarce larger than a hat, and an abyss of full
six feet wide, foaming and unfathomable, raged between
it and the nearest foothold. What was to be
done? Had we a plank, even, there was no possible
hold for the further extremity, and the shape of the
rock was so conical, that its slippery surface evidently
would not hold a rope for a moment. To jump to her,
even if it were possible, would endanger her life, and
while I was smiling and encouraging the beautiful
creature, as she stood trembling and pale on her dangerous
foothold, I felt my very heart sink within me.

The despairing guide said something which I could
not hear, and disappeared through the watery wall,
and I fixed my eyes upon the lovely form, standing,
like a spirit in the misty shroud of the spray, as if the
intensity of my gaze could sustain her upon her dangerous
foothold. I would have given ten years of my
life at that moment to have clasped her hand in mine.

I had scarce thought of Job until I felt him trying
to pass behind me. His hand was trembling as he
laid it on my shoulder to steady his steps; but there
was something in his ill-hewn features that shot an
indefinable ray of hope through my mind. His sandy
hair was plastered over his forehead, and his scant
dress clung to him like a skin; but though I recall
his image now with a smile, I looked upon him with a
feeling far enough from amusement then. God bless
thee, my dear Job! wherever in this unfit world thy
fine spirit may be fulfilling its destiny!

He crept down carefully to the edge of the foaming
abyss, till he stood with the breaking bubbles at his
knees. I was at a loss to know what he intended.
She surely would not dare to attempt a jump to his
arms from that slippery rock, and to reach her in any
way seemed impossible.

The next instant he threw himself forward, and
while I covered my eyes in horror, with the flashing
conviction that he had gone mad and flung himself
into the hopeless whirlpool to reach her, she had
crossed the awful gulf, and lay trembling and exhausted
at my feet! He had thrown himself over the
chasm, caught the rock barely with the extremities of
his fingers, and with certain death if he missed his
hold or slipped from his uncertain tenure, had sustained
her with supernatural strength as she walked
over his body!

The guide providentially returned with a rope in
the same instant, and fastening it around one of his
feet, we dragged him back through the whirlpool, and
after a moment or two to recover from the suffocating
immersion, he fell on his knees, and we joined him,
I doubt not devoutly, in his inaudible thanks to God.