and her "Farewell to Niagara," concluding
... it were sweet
To linger here, and be thy worshipper,
Until death's footstep broke this dream of life.
Supremely devout in tone, her Niagara poems are commonplace in imagination. Her fancy rarely reaches higher than the perfectly obvious. I confess that I cannot read her lines without a vision of the lady herself standing in rapt attitude on the edge of Table Rock, with note-book in hand and pencil uplifted to catch the purest inspiration from the scene before her. She is the type of a considerable train of writers whose Niagara effusions leave on the reader's mind little impression beyond an iterated "Oh, thou great Niagara, Oh!" Such a one was Richard Kelsey, whose "Niagara and Other Poems," printed in London in 1848, is likely to be encountered in old London bookshops. I have read Mr. Kelsey's "Niagara" several times. Once when I first secured the handsome gilt-edged volume; again, later on, to discover why I failed to remember any word or thought of it; and again, in the preparation of this paper, that I might justly characterize it. But I am free to confess that beyond a general impression of Parnassian attitudinizing and extravagant apostrophe I get nothing out of its pages. Decidedly better are the lines "On Visiting the Falls of Niagara," by Lord Morpeth, the Earl of Carlisle, who visited Niagara in 1841.[84] He, too, begins with the inevitable apostrophe:
There's nothing great or bright, thou glorious fall!
Thou mayst not to the fancy's sense recall—
but he saves himself with a fairly creditable sentiment:
Oh! may the wars that madden in thy deeps
There spend their rage nor climb the encircling steeps,
And till the conflict of thy surges cease
The nations on thy bank repose in peace.
A British poet who should perhaps have mention in this connection is Thomas Campbell, whose poem, "The Emigrant," contains an allusion to Niagara. It was published anonymously in 1823 in the New Monthly Magazine, which Campbell then edited.[85]
No poem on Niagara that I know of is more entitled to our respectful consideration than the elaborate work which was published in 1848 by the Rev. C. H. A. Bulkley of Mt. Morris, N. Y. It is a serious attempt to produce a great poem with Niagara Falls as its theme. Its length—about 3,600 lines—secures to Western New York the palm for elaborate treatment of the cataract in verse. "Much," says the author, "has been written hitherto upon Niagara in fugitive verse, but no attempt like this has been made to present its united wonders as the theme of a single poem. It seems a bold adventure and one too hazardous, because of the greatness of the subject and the obscurity of the bard; but his countrymen are called upon to judge it with impartiality, and pronounce its life or its death. The author would not shrink from criticism.... His object has been, not so much to describe at length the scenery of Niagara in order to excite emotions in the reader similar to those of the beholder, for this would be a vain endeavor, as to give a transcript of what passes through the mind of one who is supposed to witness so grand an achievement of nature. The difficulty," he adds, "with those who visit this wonderful cataract is to give utterance to those feelings and thoughts that crowd within and often, because thus pent up, produce what may be termed the pain of delight."
Of a poem which fills 132 duodecimo pages it is difficult to give a fair idea in a few words. There is an introductory apostrophe, followed by a specific apostrophe to the falls as a vast form of life. Farther on the cataract is apostrophized as a destroyer, as an historian, a warning prophet, an oracle of truth, a tireless laborer. There are many passages descriptive of the islands, the gorge, the whirlpool, etc. Then come more apostrophes to the fall respecting its origin and early life. It is viewed as the presence-chamber of God, and as a proof of Deity. Finally, we have the cataract's hymn to the Creator, and the flood's death-dirge.
No long poem is without its commonplace intervals. Mr. Bulkley's "Niagara" has them to excess, yet as a whole it is the work of a refined and scholarly mind, its imagination hampered by its religious habit, but now and than quickened to lofty flights, and strikingly sustained and noble in its diction. Only a true poet takes such cognizance of initial impulses and relations in nature as this: