Miles apart from one another, out of the ridge of mountains between Sweden and Norway, come the east and west Dal-elvs, which first become confluent and have one bed above Balstad.  They have taken up rivers and lakes in their waters.  Do but visit this place! here are pictorial riches to be found; the most picturesque landscapes, dizzyingly grand, smilingly pastoral—­idyllic:  one is drawn onward up to the very source of the elv, the bubbling well above Finman’s hut:  one feels a desire to follow every branch of the stream that the river takes in.

The first mighty fall, Njupeskoers cataract, is seen by the Norwegian frontier in Sernasog.  The mountain stream rushes perpendicularly from the rock to a depth of seventy fathoms.

We pause in the dark forest, where the elv seems to collect within itself nature’s whole deep gravity.  The stream rolls its clear waters over a porphyry soil where the mill-wheel is driven, and the gigantic porphyry bowls and sarcophagi are polished.

We follow the stream through Siljan’s lake, where superstition sees the water-sprite swim, like the sea-horse with a mane of green sea-weed, and where the aerial images present visions of witchcraft in the warm summer days.

We sail on the stream from Siljan’s lake, under the weeping willows of the parsonage, where the swans assemble in flocks; we glide along slowly with horses and carriages on the great ferry-boat, away over the rapid current under Balstad’s picturesque shore.  Here the elv widens and rolls its billows majestically in a woodland landscape, as large and extended as if it were in North America.

We see the rushing, rapid stream under Avista’s yellow clay declivities:  the yellow water falls like fluid amber in picturesque cataracts before the copper-works, where rainbow-coloured tongues of fire shoot themselves upwards, and the hammer’s blows on the copper plates resound to the monotonous, roaring rumble of the elv-fall.

And now, as a concluding passage of splendour in the life of the Dal-elvs, before they lose themselves in the waters of the Baltic, is the view of Elvkarleby Fall.  Schubert compares it with the fall of Schafhausen; but we must remember, that the Rhine there has not such a mass of water as that which rushes down Elvkarleby.

Two and a half Swedish miles from Gefle, where the high road to Upsala goes over the Dal-elv, we see from the walled bridge, which we pass over, the whole of that immense fall.  Close up to the bridge, there is a house where the bridge toll is paid.  There the stranger can pass the night, and from his little window look over the falling waters, see them in the clear moonlight, when darkness has laid itself to rest within the thicket of oaks and firs, and all the effect of light is in those foaming, flowing waters, and see them when the morning sun stretches his rainbow in the trembling spray, like an airy bridge of colours, from the shore to the wood-grown rock in the centre of the cataract.