Very beautiful as is this fall, it is greatly excelled in grandeur and magnificence by the cataract half a mile below it, where the river takes another perpendicular plunge of three hundred and twenty feet into the most gloomy cavern that ever received so majestic a visitant.  Between the two falls, the river, though bordered by lofty precipices, expands in width and flows gently over a nearly level surface until its near approach to the verge.  Here a sudden convergence in the rocks compresses its channel, and with a gurgling, choking struggle, it leaps with a single bound, sheer from an even level shelf, into the tremendous chasm.  The sheet could not be more perfect if wrought by art.  The Almighty has vouchsafed no grander scene to human eyes.  Every object that meets the vision increases its sublimity.  There is a majestic harmony in the whole, which I have never seen before in nature’s grandest works.  The fall itself takes its leap between the jaws of rocks whose vertical height above it is more than six hundred feet, and more than nine hundred feet above the chasm into which it falls.  Long before it reaches the base it is enveloped in spray, which is woven by the sun’s rays into bows radiant with all the colors of the prism, and arching the face of the cataract with their glories.  Five hundred feet below the edge of the canon, and one hundred and sixty feet above the verge of the cataract, and overlooking the deep gorge beneath, on the flattened summit of a projecting crag, I lay with my face turned into the boiling chasm, and with a stone suspended by a large cord measured its profoundest depths.  Three times in its descent the cord was parted by abrasion, but at last, securing the weight with a leather band, I was enabled to ascertain by a measurement which I think quite exact, the height of the fall.  It is a little more than three hundred and twenty feet; while the perpendicular wall down which I suspended the weight was five hundred and ten feet.

[Illustration:  LOWER FALL OF THE YELLOWSTONE.]

Looking down from this lofty eminence through the canon below the falls, the scene is full of grandeur.  The descent of the river for more than a mile is marked by continuous cascades varying in height from five to twenty feet, and huge rapids breaking over the rocks, and lashing with foam the precipitous sides of the gorge.  A similar descent through the entire canon (thirty miles), is probable, as in no other way except by distinct cataracts of enormous height can the difference in altitude between this point and its outlet be explained.  The colors of the rock, which is shaly in character, are variegated with yellow, gray and brown, and the action of the water in its rapid passage down the sides of the canon has worn the fragments of shale into countless capricious forms.  Jets of steam issue from the sides of the canon at frequent intervals, marking the presence of thermal springs and active volcanic forces.  The evidence of a recession of the river through the canon is designated by the ridges apparent on its sides, and it is not improbable that at no distant day the lower fall will become blended by this process with the upper, forming a single cataract nearly five hundred feet in height.