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near that as any thing.' It is thus with Niagara. There is no emblem: it has no rival—it is like no rival. Its multitudinous waves have a glory and a grandeur of their own, to which nothing can be added, and from which nothing can be taken away.

IT has been said, that the tremors or presentiments of those who march to battle, are dissipated by the bustling of caparisoned horses, the rolling of the war-drum, the clangour of the trumpet, the clink and fall of swords-the noise of the captains and the shouting.' Some such kind of inspiration is given to the thoughtful and observant man, who goes under the Great Fall of Niagara. As I moved along behind my sable guide, holding on to his dexter,

'Even as a child, when scaring sounds molest,
Clings close and closer to its mother's breast;'

while the waters dashed fiercer and more fiercely around about me, methought I had, in an evil hour, surrendered myself to perdition, and was now being dragged thither by the ebon paw of Satan. Shortly, however, the stormy music of Niagara took possession of my soul; and had Abaddon himself been there, I could have followed him home. For one moment, only, I faltered. The edge of the sheet nearest the Canada side, from its rude and fretting contact with the shore above, comes down with a stain of reddish brown. Near Termination Rock, you pass by that dim border of the Fall, and exchanging recent darkness for the green and spectral light struggling through the thick water, you are enabled to discern where you are. My GOD! It is enough to make an earth-tried angel shudder, familiar though he may be with the wonder-workings of the Eternal. Look upward! There, forming a dismal curve over your head, and looming in the deceptive and unearthly light, to a seeming distance of many hundred feet, moaning with that ceaseless anthem which trembles at their base, the rocks arise toward Heaven-covered with the green ooze of centuries hanging in horrid shelves, and apparently on the very point of breaking with the weight of that accumulated sea which tumbles and howls over their upper verge! There is no scene of sublimity on earth comparable to this. You stand beneath the rushing tributes from a hundred lakes; you seem to hear the wailings of imprisoned spirits, until, fraught and filled with the spirit of the scene, you exclaim-THERE IS A GOD! and this vast cataract, awful, overpowering as it is, is but a play-thing of his hand!'

THERE is one dreadful illusion to which the untrained eye is subject, under this water-avalanche. You know, travelled reader, that when you journey swiftly in a rail-road car, the landscape seems moving past you with the speed of lightning. You see distant trees and fields, apparently out of compliment to the locomotive, wheeling off obsequiously to the right and left. Every grove seems engaged in a rigadoon. This illuso visus is particularly discernible on the face of Niagara, when you are beneath the Falls. Look at the sheet but for one moment, and you find yourself rising upward with the swiftness of thought.

Turning your eye to the rocky wall which bounds you, for a moment you give a side-long glance at its dizzy extent. Heavens! what was that noise? Did not a portion of the rock above-some massy mountain of stone-then fall? No - it was only the thunder of commingled rapids, which united at the edge of the precipice, and rushed impetuously into the abyss together. It is this which makes such heavy music such solemn tones in the distant voice of Niagara.

A MOST thorough bath — such an one as I never took before— gave me, after my changed dress, and proper probation, a superior appetite for joining a supper party at the Pavilion. I remember the pleasure I once enjoyed, during a summer sojourn at West Point, among congenial spirits. Every day, at dinner, in the large mirrors which bedeck the dining saloon at COZZEN's capital establishment, what time we discussed viands and wines, I could see the reflected Hudson and its shores - the distant mountains towering into the sky-and steam-craft moving; while

'from town to town,

The snowy sails went gleaming down.'

You seem to think, if you are any thing of an economist, at Niagara, that you are likely to get from your host the worth of your money. He gives you green or black tea,' and all the appointments of a good supper, and he flings in a view of Niagara from the dining-room windows, without any extra expense! Its music shakes your hand as you lift your coffee to your lip; its bounding and agitated lapse smites your eye, as you sip the juice of the Moca berry - yet you never find it i’ the bill. If you wish to be fleeced, however, employ a guide to tell you when is the time to say 'Good gracious! how sublime!' and to show you the thousand little nothings in the vicinity of the Falls, which, compared with them, are, as it might be, to pit a flea in fight against a lion or an elephant. Ye blind guides!-door-keepers of the gates of sublimity, which you cannot speak of or describe, save in the stale terms of business! Ye tell a man whose heart and mind are overflowing with awe and wonder when to use his eyes! Ye are varlets all; akin to that enterprising man, mentioned, if I mistake not, by Goldsmith, who issued proposals to bite off his own nose by subscription! — or rather, to that builder of chapeaux, who exclaimed, in a paroxysm of delight, as he stood at the foot of the Canada Fall, By the Lord!- what a glorious place for washing hats!

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WELL I have sojourned near, and surveyed, Niagara, until it is pictured in my mind, and I know it as it were a favorite book. A word here, then, to tourists who have that chief marvel of the world to see. There will perhaps be disappointment in a far-off view, as you go from the south; for the majestic rush of the rapids, and the heavy plunge of the fall, you cannot see. To my New-York reader I can give a simile. Supposing the Hudson ran from the bay of your metropolis rapidly to the north. Plant its shores, from the city to the Pallisades, with bold headlands, and ancient forests. At the Pallisades, let the

1836.] The Sublime and Ridiculous- Counsel to Visitors.

471

river break off, and fall to the distance of between one and two hundred feet, and then go heaving onward to Sing Sing, through a huge natural canal, wide as itself, crowned, at the top of the high precipices which border its sides, with shaggy pines and hemlocks, and flowery shrubs and parasites, where the vulture wheels, and the boding owl makes his complaint at evening. This is a faint idea of Niagara. You should sit for hours in the eastern portico of the Pavilion, looking at the waves as they rush over the Horse-Shoe Fall. Continually, large masses of them, green as the richest verd antique, shoot in blended company down into the abysm of hell' beneath. From this point they are full of beauty. Unable to keep together, they burst into foam; so that the continual recurrence of this has the effect of a long waste of the finest embroidery, in flowers, leaves, and vines, on a ground of green. Over them plays the rainbow, spanning them with its heavenly arch, and shining lovingly upon the madness of which it is created; stretching itself to the distant island, where its ethereal colors smile on the rich woods and golden waters. There in the portico aforesaid is the place to sit and inly ruminate. I saw one fat John Bull, 'a round and stocky man,' in a checked travelling shirt, and a swallowtailed coat, whose lappels were almost pulled round beneath his arms, standing like some corpulent fowl on the last ledge of Table Rock, peering into the Falls, then only about ten or twelve feet from his side, with a telescope twice as long as his body! It was a pure specimen of the sublime and the ridiculous.

you are

HERE let me play the counsellor to the visitor at Niagara. I offer my opinion with confident diffidence. Doubtless you desire to receive at the Falls, and to carry away with you, the strongest impression. Do not therefore go down to the foot of the cataract on the Canada side. Take your coup d'ail as you drive in your carriage to the Pavilion. Take your supper there, as did the goodly company of your adviser, Ollapod. Supposing you are an American-which I trust you will of course feel a sort of pride in believing that the best view is on the American side. And so it is: yet to look at the United States' part of the cataract, you would say it was a mere mill-dam. It is thus that distance deceives. You cannot see the movement of that far-off water, or hear distinctly the horrid sound with which it plunges from its cloud-kissing elevation to the depth below. But if you would obtain the deepest and strongest thoughts of Niagara, do as I say. Observe the semicircular cataract on the Canada side from the espla nade of the Pavilion but do not go down to the base of the Fall. Let the view remain upon your mind as a beautiful picture; keep the music in your ear, for it is a stern and many-toned music, that you cannot choose but hear. Order the coachman to transport your luggage to the ferry below the Falls - some mile or so. There embark: you will be frightened, doubtless, as you gaze to the south, and see the awful torrent pouring down upon you; but you may take the word of the ferry man that for some dozen or twenty years he has never met with an accident: you may believe him, for the air of truth breathes

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through his large grim whiskers. You will see the waves curling their turbulent tops, and dark rocks emerging from their milky current and seething foam, within a yard of your prow but be not afraid.

You are soon at the foot of

THE AMERICAN STAIR-CASE.

And here, after all, kind reader, is the place for a view. Do not look about you much. Be content with the thunder in your ears, and wait until some practised and tasteful observer, kindly acting as your cicerone, bids you stop just at that point on the stair-case where the plunging river, on the American side, dashes downward in its propulsive journey. There, by the onward plunge of the cataract, which bounds in a ridge over the abyss, describing as it were a circular fall, the view of Goat Island is completely cut off, and the whole sweep of the Falls-Canadian, American, and all is seen at once; apparently one unbroken waste of stormy and tumultuous waters. You must be a demigod, if you can stand on that hallowed ground, shaking with the accents of a God, spanned with his bow, resounding with his strength, and laughing in his smile, without emotions of indescribable wonder. Thus, with a trembling hand, and a spirit saturated with the grandeur of the scene, Ollapod pencilled his hasty, weak, and inexpressive scrawl:

HERE speaks the voice of God! Let man be dumb,
Nor, with his vain aspirings, hither come;
That voice impels these hollow-sounding floods,
And with its presence shakes the distant woods;
These groaning rocks the Almighty's finger piled --
For ages here his painted bow has smiled;
Mocking the changes and the chance of time-
Eternal beautiful- serene - sublime!

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FOR the rest as touching the sound of Niagara our wanderings over Great Island-the fair friends we met perambulating there; with divers other peregrinations the journey toward the orientthe scenes of Lewiston, Queenston, Lockport, Rochester-that lovely and most hospitable city-shall they not be presented to thee, kind reader, in the next subsections of

Thine, heartily, and to serve,

AUTUMNAL MONITIONS.

Он many smiles are dimmed by tears,
And dark is many a brow-

And eyes that beamed in former years

Are closed forever now:

The life from stricken hearts hath gushed,
And many a gentle voice is hushed,

Or only sounds in woe:

Oh, as the dying year goes by.
How many stars it dims on high!

OLLAPOD.

LITERARY NOTICES.

A LIFE OF WASHINGTON IN LATIN PROSE: by FRANCIS GLASS, A. M., of Ohio. Edited by J. N. REYNOLDS, Esq. Third Edition. New-York: HARPER AND BROTHERS. WE are glad to find, that our anticipations respecting the success of this work have been fully realized, and that it has become already a favorite text-book in most of our classical schools. The present edition makes its appearance with the additional advantage of a copious vocabulary, in which particular care has been taken, among other things, to designate such terms as are of modern origin, and such as, though employed by the ancient writers, are here used in a modern sense. We do not know that any thing can now be done to render the work more valuable and complete, or better calculated to answer the object, and do honor to the memory, of its erudite author. Our intention, however, in writing the present article is, not to praise the book itself, for that were now a superfluous task, but to undertake its defence against a very superficial and illiberal critique, which appeared in the last number of the North American Review. Longinus thought, in his day, that the faculty of passing a sound judgment upon writings was the final result of extensive experience; but Longinus was a fool to think so, and the young gentleman who perpetrates the classical articles in the numbers of the North American could teach him a far different lesson. It was commonly supposed, among the earlier race of scholars, that, in order to become a critic, a man must read and think, and have a little stock of his own with which to enter upon this line of business; but in these days of fictitious capital, you can do just as well by borrowing, and can save in the bargain a vast deal of valuable time. A person would be a very great simpleton, now-a-days, to sit down and study to

be a critic.

Poor Glass's work has been subjected to the ordeal of this modern school of criticism; and, as may be expected, has received but little quarter from the Aristarchus of New-England. None of its beauties-and they are not few in number-are even so much as hinted at. No merit whatever is ascribed to the fact of the author's having written his work at a distance from all those aids to composition with which others are so abundantly supplied. A few paltry attempts are made, in the very worst spirit of criticism that can disgrace a pedagogue, to pick out some half a dozen verbal errors, and in every instance these attempts have proved completely abortive. A reviewer, who handles in this way the work of another, ought, from motives of common prudence, to look carefully to his own doctrines, lest, from want of sufficient acquaintance with his subject, he be led into greater errors than those which he undertakes to condemn. Let us see, for a moment, how the case stands, in this respect, with our critic. He regrets that the voluminous writings of Cato, Varro, and Lucceius, have not been preserved. Would poor Glass have ever been guilty of such a tissue of blunders? In the first place, the only one of the three that deserves the name of a voluminous writer, is Varro, and no one at all acquainted with literary history would ever think of ranking Cato, much less Lucceius, in the same class with him, as regarded the number of their productions. In the next place, the reviewer VOL. VIII.

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