ed to hear it; but as soon as
they released their eyes from this service, every fibre in them vibrated
to the sound, and the spectacle dissolved away in it. They were aware,
too, of a strange capriciousness in their senses, and of a tendency of
each to palter with the things perceived. The eye could no longer take
truthful note of quality, and now beheld the tumbling deluge as a Gothic
wall of careen marble, white, motionless, and now as a fall of lightest
snow, with movement in all its atoms, and scarce so much cohesion as
would hold them together; and again they could not discern if this course
were from above or from beneath, whether the water rose from the abyss or
dropped from the height. The ear could give the brain no assurance of the
sound that felled it, and whether it were great or little; the prevailing
softness of the cataract's tone seemed so much opposed to ideas of
prodigious force or of prodigious volume. It was only when the sight, so
idle in its own behalf, came to the aid of the other sense, and showed
them the mute movement of each other's lips, that they dimly appreciated
the depth of sound that involved them.

"I think you might have been high-strung there, for a second or two,"
said Basil, when, ascending the incline; he could make himself heard. "We
will try the bridge next."

Over the river, so still with its oily eddies and delicate wreaths of
foam, just below the Falls they have in late years woven a web of wire
high in air, and hung a bridge from precipice to precipice. Of all the
bridges made with hands it seems the lightest, most ethereal; it is
ideally graceful, and droops from its slight towers like a garland. It is
worthy to command, as it does, the whole grandeur of Niagara, and to show
the traveller the vast spectacle, from the beginning of the American Fall
to the farthest limit of the Horse-Shoe, with all the awful pomp of the
rapids, the solemn darkness of the wooded islands, the mystery of the
vaporous gulf, the indomitable wildness of the shores, as far as the eye
can reach up or down the fatal stream.

To this bridge our friends now repaired, by a path that led through
another of those groves which keep the village back from the shores of
the river on the American side, and greatly help the sight-seer's
pleasure in the place. The exquisite structure, which sways so
tremulously from its towers, and seems to lay so slight a hold on earth
where its cables sink into the ground, is