"What myriad rainbow colors float
About thee like a veil,
And in what countless streams remote
Thy life has left its trail!"
"Yes, George," the maiden cried in haste,
"Such shades I've never seen,
I'm going to have my next new waist
The color of that green."
From about 1850 down to the present hour there is a striking dearth of verse, worthy to be called poetry, with Niagara for its theme. Newspapers and magazines would no doubt yield a store if they could be gleaned; perchance the one Niagara pearl of poetry is thus overlooked; but it is reasonably safe to assume that few really great poems sink utterly from sight. There is, or was, a self-styled Bard of Niagara, whose verses, printed at Montreal in 1872, need not detain us. The only long work on the subject of real merit that I know of, which has appeared in recent years, is George Houghton's "Niagara," published in 1882. Like Mr. Bulkley, he has a true poet's grasp of the material aspect of his subject:
Formed when the oceans were fashioned, when all the world was a workshop;
Loud roared the furnace fires and tall leapt the smoke from volcanoes,
Scooped were round bowls for lakes and grooves for the sliding of rivers,
Whilst with a cunning hand, the mountains were linked together.
Then through the day-dawn, lurid with cloud, and rent by forked lightning,
Stricken by earthquake beneath, above by the rattle of thunder,
Sudden the clamor was pierced by a voice, deep-lunged and portentous—
Thine, O Niagara, crying, "Now is creation completed!"
He sees in imagination the million sources of the streams in forest and prairie, which ultimately pour their gathered "tribute of silver" from the rich Western land into the lap of Niagara. He makes skillful use of the Indian legendry associated with the river; he listens to Niagara's "dolorous fugue," and resolves it into many contributory cries. In exquisite fancy he listens to the incantation of the siren rapids:
Thus, in some midnight obscure, bent down by the storm of temptation
(So hath the wind, in the beechen wood, confided the story),
Pine trees, thrusting their way and trampling down one another,
Curious, lean and listen, replying in sobs and in whispers;
Till of the secret possessed, which brings sure blight to the hearer
(So hath the wind, in the beechen wood, confided the story),
Faltering, they stagger brinkward—clutch at the roots of the grasses,
Cry—a pitiful cry of remorse—and plunge down in the darkness.
The cataract in its varied aspects is considered with a thought for those who
Sin, and with wine-cup deadened, scoff at the dread of hereafter,—
And, because all seems lost, besiege Death's door-way with gladness.