to other bridges what the blood
horse is to the common breed of roadsters; ant now they felt its
sensitive nerves quiver under them and sympathetically through them as
they advanced farther and farther toward the centre. Perhaps their
sympathy with the bridge's trepidation was too great for unalloyed
delight, and yet the thrill was a glorious one, to be known only there;
and afterwards, at least, they would not have had their airy path seem
more secure.

The last hues of sunset lingered in the mists that sprung from the base
of the Falls with a mournful, tremulous grace, and a movement weird as
the play of the northern lights. They were touched with the most delicate
purples and crimsons, that darkened to deep red, and then faded from them
at a second look, and they flew upward, swiftly upward, like troops of
pale, transparent ghosts; while a perfectly clear radiance, better than
any other for local color, dwelt upon the scene. Far under the bridge the
river smoothly swam, the undercurrents forever unfolding themselves upon
the surface with a vast rose-like evolution, edged all round with faint
lines of white, where the air that filled the water freed itself in foam.
What had been clear green on the face of the cataract was here more like
rich verd-antique, and had a look of firmness almost like that of the
stone itself. So it showed beneath the bridge, and down the river till
the curving shores hid it. These, springing abruptly prom the water's
brink, and shagged with pine and cedar, displayed the tender verdure of
grass and bushes intermingled with the dark evergreens that comb from
ledge to ledge, till they point their speary tops above the crest of
bluffs. In front, where tumbled rocks and expanses of caked clay varied
the gloomier and gayer green, sprung those spectral mists; and through
them loomed out, in its manifold majesty, Niagara, with the seemingly
immovable white Gothic screen of the American Fall, and the green massive
curve of the Horseshoe, solid and simple and calm as an Egyptian wall;
while behind this, with their white and black expanses broken by dark
foliaged little isles, the steep Canadian rapids billowed down between
their heavily wooded shores.

The wedding-journeyers hung, they knew not how long, in rapture on the
sight; and then, looking back from the shore to the spot where they had
stood, they felt relieved that unreality should possess itself of all,
and that the bridge should swing there