but now and then
heavy currents of air drew this aside, and they saw the outline of the
Falls almost as far as the Canada side. They remembered afterwards how
they were able to make use of but one sense at a time, and how when they
strove to take in the forms of the descending flood, they ceased 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 g