The poetry of Niagara Falls is contemporary with the first knowledge of the cataract among civilized men. One may make this statement with positiveness, inasmuch as the first book printed in Europe which mentions Niagara Falls contains a poem in which allusion is made to that wonder. This work is the excessively rare "Des Sauvages" of Champlain (Paris, 1604),[71] in which, after the dedication, is a sonnet, inscribed "Le Sievr de la Franchise av discovrs Dv Sievr Champlain." It seems proper, in quoting this first of all Niagara poems, to follow as closely as may be in modern type the archaic spelling of the original:
Mvses, si vous chantez, vrayment ie vous conseille
Que vous louëz Champlain, pour estre courageux:
Sans crainte des hasards, il a veu tant de lieux,
Que ses relations nous contentent l'oreille.
Il a veu le Perou,[72] Mexique & la Merueille
Du Vulcan infernal qui vomit tant de feux,
Et les saults Mocosans,[73] qui offensent les yeux
De ceux qui osent voir leur cheute nonpareille.
Il nous promet encor de passer plus auant,
Reduire les Gentils, & trouuer le Leuant,
Par le Nort, ou le Su, pour aller à la Chine.
C'est charitablement tout pour l'amour de Dieu.
Fy des lasches poltrons qui ne bougent d'vn lieu!
Leur vie, sans mentir, me paroist trop mesquine.
I regret that some research has failed to discover any further information regarding the poet De la Franchise. Obviously, he took rather more than the permissible measure of poet's license in saying that Champlain had seen Peru, a country far beyond the known range of Champlain's travels. But in the phrase "les saults Mocosans," the falls of Mocosa, we have the ancient name of the undefined territory afterwards labeled "Virginia." The intent of the allusion is made plainer by Marc Lescarbot, who in 1610 wrote a poem in which he speaks of "great falls which the Indians say they encounter in ascending the St. Lawrence as far as the neighborhood of Virginia."[74] The allusion can only be to Niagara.
It is gratifying to find our incomparable cataract a theme for song, even though known only by aboriginal report, thus at the very dawn of exploration in this part of America. It is fitting, too, that the French should be the first to sing of what they discovered. More than a century after De la Franchise and Lescarbot, a Frenchman who really saw the falls introduced them to the muse, though only by a quotation. This was Father Charlevoix, who, writing "From the Fall of Niagara, May 14, 1721," to the Duchess of Lesdiguieres, was moved to aid his description by quoting poetry. "Ovid," the priest wrote to the duchess, "gives us the description of such another cataract, situated according to him in the delightful valley of Tempe. I will not pretend that the country of Niagara is as fine as that, though I believe its cataract much the noblest of the two," and he thereupon quotes these lines from the "Metamorphoses":
Est nemus Hæmoniæ, prærupta quod undique claudit
Sylva; vocant Tempe, per quæ Peneus ab imo
Effusus Pindo spumosis volvitur undis,
Dejectisque gravi tenues agitantia fumos
Nubila conducit, summisque aspergine sylvas,
Impluit, et sonitu plusquam vicina fatigat.
It would be strange if there were not other impressionable Frenchmen who composed or quoted verses expressive of Niagara's grandeur, during the eighty-one years that elapsed between the French discovery of Niagara Falls and the English Conquest—a period of over three-quarters of a century during which earth's most magnificent cataract belonged to France. But if priest or soldier, coureur-de-bois or verse-maker at the court of Louis said aught in meter of Niagara in all that time, I have not found it.
A little thunder by Sir William Johnson's guns at Fort Niagara, a little blood on the Plains of Abraham, and Niagara Falls was handed over to Great Britain. Four years after the Conquest English poetry made its first claim to our cataract. In 1764 appeared that ever-delightful work, "The Traveller, or, a Prospect of Society," wherein we read:
Have we not seen at pleasure's lordly call
The smiling long-frequented village fall?
Behold the duteous son, the sire decayed,
The modest matron or the blushing maid,
Forced from their homes, a melancholy train,
To traverse climes beyond the western main;
Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around
And Niagara[75] stuns with thundering sound.
Even now, perhaps, as there some pilgrim strays
Through tangled forests and through dangerous ways,
Where beasts with man divided empire claim,
And the brown Indian marks with murderous aim;
There, while above the giddy tempest flies,
And all around distressful yells arise,
The pensive exile, bending with his woe,
To stop too fearful and too faint to go,
Casts a long look where England's glories shine,
And bids his bosom sympathize with mine.[76]
Obviously, Oliver Goldsmith's "Traveller," in its American allusions, reflected the current literature of those years when Englishmen heard more of Oswego than they ever have since. Niagara and Oswego were uttermost points told of in the dispatches, during that long war, reached and held by England's "far-flung battle line"; but if Britain's poets found any inspiration in Niagara's mighty fount for a half century after Goldsmith, I know it not.
And this brings us again to our first visiting poet, Tom Moore, whose approach to Niagara by way of Buffalo in 1804 has been described. Penning an epistle in rhyme from "Buffalo, on Lake Erie," to the Hon. W. R. Spencer—writing, we are warranted in fancying, after a supper of poor bacon and tea, or an evening among the loutish Indians who hung about Crow's log-tavern—he recorded his emotions in no amiable mood: