I discovered for myself, and thought
it for some time an accidental beauty which it would not do to
leave, lest I might never see it again. After I found it permanent,
I returned many times to watch the play of its crest. In the little
waterfall beyond, Nature seems, as she often does, to have made a
study for some larger design. She delights in this,--a sketch within
a sketch, a dream within a dream. Wherever we see it, the lines of
the great buttress in the fragment of stone, the hues of the
waterfall copied in the flowers that star its bordering mosses, we
are delighted; for all the lineaments become fluent, and we mould the
scene in congenial thought with its genius.

People complain of the buildings at Niagara, and fear to see it
further deformed. I cannot sympathize with such an apprehension: the
spectacle is capable of swallowing up all such objects; they are not
seen in the great whole, more than an earthworm in a wide field.

The beautiful wood on Goat Island is full of flowers; many of the
fairest love to do homage here. The Wake-robin and May-apple are in
bloom now; the former, white, pink, green, purple, copying the rainbow
of the fall, and fit to make a garland for its presiding deity when he
walks the land, for they are of imperial size, and shaped like stones
for a diadem. Of the May-apple, I did not raise one green tent without
finding a flower beneath.

And now farewell. Niagara. I have seen thee, and I think all who come
here must in some sort see thee; thou art not to be got rid of as
easily as the stars. I will be here again beneath some flooding July
moon and sun. Owing to the absence of light, I have seen the rainbow
only two or three times by day; the lunar bow not at all. However, the
imperial presence needs not its crown, though illustrated by it.

General Porter and Jack Downing were not unsuitable figures here. The
former heroically planted the bridges by which we cross to Goat Island
and the Wake-robin-crowned genius has punished his temerity with
deafness, which must, I think, have come upon him when he sunk the
first stone in the rapids. Jack seemed an acute and entertaining
representative of Jonathan, come to look at his great water-privilege.
He told us all about the Americanisms of the spectacle; that is to
say, the battles that have been fought here. It seems strange that
men could fight in such a place; but no temple can still the personal
griefs and strifes in the breasts of its v