long bent
crest--shimmering with the changing colors of a peacock's back--smooth
as a lake when all winds sleep; and then the mighty river was snuffed
out in gulfs of angry gray. Capricious river draughts, sucking up the
damp defile, whipped upward into the blistering sunlight gray spiral
towers that leaped into opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond
and pearl and amethyst.

[Illustration: GREAT FALLS FROM CLIFF ABOVE.]

[Illustration: GREAT FALLS FROM THE FRONT.]

I caught myself tightly gripping the ledge and shrinking with a
shuddering instinctive fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle
all memory of sound--and left only the silent universe with myself and
this terribly beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness. And I
loved it with a strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself
so magnificently; and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a
mountain, or a flower, or a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, or an ocean,
or a thunderstorm has to do in this world. And it was doing it right
out in the middle of a desert, bleak, sun-leprosied, forbidding, with
only the stars and the moon and the sun and a cliff-swallow or two to
behold. Thundering out its message into the waste places, careless of
audiences--like a Master! Bully, grizzled old Master-Bard singing--as
most of them do--to empty benches! And it had been doing that ten
thousand thousand years, and would do so for ten thousand thousand more,
and never pause for plaudits. I suspect the soul of old Homer did
that--and is still doing it, somehow, somewhere. After all there isn't
much difference between really tremendous things--Homer or waterfalls or
thunderstorms--is there? It's only a matter of how things happen to be
big.

I was absent-mindedly chasing some big thundering line of Sophocles when
Bill, the little Cornishman, ran in between me and the evasive line:
"Lord! what a waste of power!"

There is some difference in temperaments. Most men, I fancy, would have
enjoyed a talk with a civil engineer upon that ledge. I should have
liked to have Shelley there, myself! It's the difference between poetry
and horse-power, dithyrambics and dynamos, Keats and Kipling! What is
the energy exerted by the Great Falls of the Missouri? How many
horse-power did Shelley fling into the creation of his _West Wind_? How
many foot-pounds did the boy heart of Chatterton beat before it broke?
Something may be left to the imagination!

We bac