It is a striking fact that Niagara's stimulus to the poetic mind has been quite as often through the ear as through the eye. The best passages of the best poems are prompted by the sound of the falling waters, rather than by the expanse of the flood, the height of cliffs, or the play of light. In Mr. Bulkley's work, which indeed exhausts the whole store of simile and comparison, we perpetually hear the voice of the falls, the myriad voices of nature, the awful voice of God.
"Minstrel of the Floods,"
he cries:
What pæans full of triumph dost thou hymn!
. . . . . . .
However varied is the rhythm sweet
Of thine unceasing song! The ripple oft
Astray along thy banks a lyric is
Of love; the cool drops trickling down thy sides
Are gentle sonnets; and thy lesser falls
Are strains elegiac, that sadly sound
A monody of grief; thy whirlpool fierce,
A shrill-toned battle-song; thy river's rush
A strain heroic with its couplet rhymes;
. . . . . . .
While the full sweep of thy close-crowded tide
Resounds supreme o'er all, an epic grand.
Of this class, too, is the "Apostrophe to Niagara," by one B. Frank Palmer, in 1855. It is said to have been "written with the pencil in a few minutes, the author seated on the bank, drenched, from the mighty bath at Termination Rock, and still listening to the roar and feeling the eternal jar of the cataract." The Rev. T. Starr King, upon reading it in 1855, said: "The apostrophe has the music of Niagara in it." As a typical example of the devotional apostrophe it is perhaps well to give it in full:
This is Jehovah's fullest organ strain!
I hear the liquid music rolling, breaking.
From the gigantic pipes the great refrain
Bursts on my ravished ear, high thoughts awaking!
The low sub-bass, uprising from the deep,
Swells the great pæan as it rolls supernal—
Anon, I hear, at one majestic sweep
The diapason of the keys eternal!
Standing beneath Niagara's angry flood—
The thundering cataract above me bounding—
I hear the echo: "Man, there is a God!"
From the great arches of the gorge resounding!