The second selection is John Galt's account, partly historical and partly imaginative, of the discovery of the cataract. John Galt (1779-1839) was a native of Scotland. He was the author of several novels that were popular in their day. He traveled extensively, and wrote many articles on historical and geographical subjects.
THE SPLENDOR OF NIAGARA.
By SIR EDWIN ARNOLD.
Before my balcony the great cataract is thundering, smoking, glittering with green and white rollers and rapids, hurling the waters of a whole continent in splendor and speed over the sharp ledges of the long, brown rock by which Erie, "the Broad," steps proudly down to Ontario, "the Beautiful."
The smaller but very imposing American Falls speaks with the louder voice of the two, because its coiling spirals of twisted and furious flood crash in full impulse of descent upon the talus of massive boulders heaped up at its foot.
The resounding impact of water on rocks, the clouds of water-smoke which rise high in the air, and the river below churned into a whirling cream of eddy and surge and backwater, unite in a composite effect, at once magnificent and bewildering.
Far away, Niagara River is seen winding eagerly to its prodigious leap. You can discern the line of the first breakers, where the river feels the fatal draw of the cataracts, its current seeming suddenly to leap forward, stimulated by mad desire, a hidden spell, a dreadful and irresistible doom.
Far back along the gilded surface of the upper stream, these lines of dancing, tossing, eager, anxious, and fate-impelled breakers and billows multiply their white ranks, and spread and close together their leaping ridges into a wild chaos of racing waves as the brink is approached. And then, at the brink, there is a curious pause—the momentary peace of the irrevocable. Those mad upper waters—reaching the great leap—are suddenly all quiet and glassy, and appear rounded and green as the border of a field of young rye, at the moment when they turn the angle of the dreadful ledge and hurl themselves into the snow-white gulf of noise and mist and mystery underneath.
There is nothing more translucently green, nor more perennially still and lovely, than Niagara the greater. At this, her awful brink, the whole architrave of the main abyss gleams like a fixed and glorious work wrought in polished aquamarine or emerald. This exquisitely colored cornice of the enormous waterfall—this brim of bright tranquillity between fervor of rush and fury of plunge—is its principal feature, and stamps it as far more beautiful than terrible. Even the central solemnity and shudder-fraught miracle of the monstrous uproar and glory is rendered exquisite, reposeful, and soothing by the lovely rainbows hanging over the turmoil and clamor.
From its crest of chrysoprase and silver, indeed, to its broad foot of milky foam and of its white-stunned waves, too broken and too dazed to begin at first to float away, Niagara appears not terrible, but divinely and deliciously graceful, glad and lovely—a specimen of the splendor of water at its finest—a sight to dwell and linger in the mind with ineffaceable images of happy and grateful thought, by no means to affect it in seeing or to haunt it in future days of memory with any wild reminiscences of terror or of gloom.