stage-bills upon the walls, looked over the register, and. finding the name of an acquaintance, sent to see if he was still there. What this hesitation arose from, I know not: perhaps it was a feeling of my unworthiness to enter this temple which nature has erected to its God.

At last, slowly and thoughtfully I walked down to the bridge leading to Goat Island, and when I stood upon this frail support, and saw a quarter of a mile of tumbling, rushing rapids, and heard their everlasting roar, my emotions overpowered me, a choking sensation rose to my throat, a thrill rushed through my veins, "my blood ran rippling to my fingers' ends." This was the climax of the effect which the falls produced upon me. Neither the American nor the British fall moved me as did these rapids. For the magnificence, the sublimity, of the latter, I was prepared by descriptions and by paintings. When I arrived in sight of them I merely felt, "Ah, yes! here is the fall, just as I have seen it in a picture." When I arrived at the Terrapin Bridge, I expected to be overwhelmed, to retire trembling from this giddy eminence, and gaze with unlimited wonder and awe upon the immense mass rolling on and on; but, somehow or other, I thought only of comparing the effect on my mind with what I had read and heard. I looked for a short time, and then, with almost a feeling of disappointment, turned to go to the other points of view, to see if I was not mistaken in not feeling any surpassing emotion at this sight. But from the foot of Biddle's Stairs, and the middle of the river, and from below the Table Rock, it was still "barren, barren all."

Provoked with my stupidity in feeling most moved in the wrong place, I turned away to the hotel, determined. to set off for Buffalo that afternoon. But the stage did not go, and after nightfall, as there was a splendid moon,

I went down to the bridge, and leaned over the parapet, where the boiling rapids came down in their might. It was grand, and it was also gorgeous; the yellow rays of the moon made the broken waves appear like auburn tresses twining around the black rocks. But they did not inspire me as before. I felt a foreboding of a mightier emotion to rise up and swallow all others, and I passed on to the Terrapin Bridge. Everything was changed; the misty apparition had taken off its many-colored crown which it had worn by day, and a bow of silvery white spanned its summit. The moonlight gave a poetical indefiniteness to the distant parts of the waters, and, while the rapids were glancing in her beams, the river below the falls was black as night, save where the reflection of the sky gave it the appearance of a shield of blued steel. No gaping tourists loitered, eying with their glasses or sketching on cards the hoary locks of the ancient rivergod. All tended to harmonize with the natural grandeur of the scene. I gazed long. I saw how here mutability and unchangeableness were united. I surveyed the conspiring waters rushing against the rocky ledge to overthrow it at one mad plunge, till, like toppling ambition, o'erleaping themselves, they fall on t'other side, expanding into foam ere they reach the deep channel where they creep submissively away.

Then arose in my breast a genuine admiration, and a humble adoration of the Being who was the architect of this and of all. Happy were the first discoverers of Niagara, those who could come unawares upon this view and upon that, whose feelings were entirely their own. With what gusto docs Father Hennepin describe "this great downfall of water," "this vast and prodigious cadence of water, which falls down after a surprising and astonishing manner, insomuch that the universe does not afford its

parallel. 'Tis true Italy and Swedeland boast of some such things, but we may well say that they be sorry patterns when compared with this of which we do now speak."

POE.

THOMAS W. HIGGINSON.

[We make the following selection from one of our most genial essayists, whose nature-studies are not surpassed in poetical grace and delicacy of discernment by any in the language, while his critical essays on authors show a mind in intimate rapport with his subject. Poe has never been treated with more felicity than in the essay given below. Mr. Higginson is the author of several volumes of essays, vigorous in thought and graceful in style; of "Malbone, an Oldport Romance," in which life in Newport is delineated with a happy power which John G. Saxe has compared to that of Hawthorne; and of Army Life in a Black Regiment," describing actual experiences of the author, who commanded a regiment of colored soldiers in the civil war. Mr. Higginson was born in 1823, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he still resides.]

IT happens to us rarely in our lives to come consciously into the presence of that extraordinary miracle we call genius. Among the many literary persons whom I have happened to meet, at home or abroad, there are not half a dozen who have left an irresistible sense of this rare quality; and, among these few, Poe stands next to Hawthorne in the vividness of personal impression he produced. I saw him but once; and it was on that celebrated occasion, in 1845, when he startled Boston by substituting his boyish production, "Al Aaraaf," for the more serious poem which he was to have delivered before the Lyceum. There was much curiosity to see him; for his prose-writings had

been eagerly read, at least among college-students, and his poems were just beginning to excite still greater attention. After a rather solid and very partisan address by Caleb Cushing, then just returned from his Chinese embassy, the poet was introduced. I distinctly recall his face, with its ample forehead, brilliant eyes, and narrowness of nose and chin; an essentially ideal face, not noble, yet anything but coarse; with the look of over-sensitiveness which when uncontrolled may prove more debasing than coarseness. It was a face to rivet one's attention in any crowd, yet a face that no one would feel safe in loving. It is not perhaps strange that I find or fancy in the portrait of Charles Baudelaire, Poe's French admirer and translator, some of the traits that are indelibly associated with that one glimpse of Poe.

I remember that when introduced he stood with a sort of shrinking before the audience, and then began, in a thin, tremulous, hardly musical voice, an apology for his poem, and a deprecation of the expected criticism of the Boston public; reiterating this in a sort of persistent, querulous way, which did not seem like satire, but impressed me at the time as nauseous flattery. It was not then generally known, nor was it established for a long time after,—even when he had himself asserted it,-that the poet was himself born in Boston; and no one can now tell, perhaps, what was the real feeling behind the apparently sycophantic attitude. When, at the end, he abruptly began the recitation of his rather perplexing poem, everybody looked thoroughly mystified. The verses had long since been printed in his youthful volume, and had reappeared within a few days, if I mistake not, in Wiley & Putnam's edition of his poems; and they produced no very distinct impression on the audience until Poe began to read the maiden's song in the second part. Already his tones had

been softening to a finer melody than at first, and when he came to the verse,

"Ligeia! Ligeia !

My beautiful one!
Whose harshest idea

Will to melody run,

Oh, is it thy will

On the breezes to toss?

Or capriciously still,

Like the lone albatross,
Incumbent on night

(As she on the air),

To keep watch with delight

On the harmony there ?"—

his voice seemed attenuated to the finest golden thread; the audience became hushed, and, as it were, breathless; there seemed no life in the hall but his; and every syllable was accentuated with such delicacy, and sustained with such sweetness, as I never heard equalled by other lips. When the lyric ended, it was like the ceasing of the gypsy's chant in Browning's "Flight of the Duchess;" and I remember nothing more, except that in walking back to Cambridge my comrades and I felt that we had been under the spell of some wizard. Indeed, I feel much the same in the retrospect, to this day.

The melody did not belong, in this case, to the poet's voice alone: it was already in the words. His verse, when he was willing to give it natural utterance, was like that of Coleridge in rich sweetness, and, like that, was often impaired by theories of structure and systematic experiments in metre. Never in American literature, I think, was such a fountain of melody flung into the air as when "Lenore" first appeared in "The Pioneer;" and never did fountain so drop downward as when Poe rearranged it in