Once, just as I had seated myself there, a man came to take his first look.  He walked close up to the fall, and, after looking at it a moment, with an air as if thinking how he could best appropriate it to his own use, he spat into it.

This trait seemed wholly worthy of an age whose love of utility is such that the Prince Puckler Muskau suggests the probability of men coming to put the bodies of their dead parents in the fields to fertilize them, and of a country such as Dickens has described; but these will not, I hope, be seen on the historic page to be truly the age or truly the America.  A little leaven is leavening the whole mass for other bread.

The whirlpool I like very much.  It is seen to advantage after the great falls; it is so sternly solemn.  The river cannot look more imperturbable, almost sullen in its marble green, than it does just below the great fall; but the slight circles that mark the hidden vortex seem to whisper mysteries the thundering voice above could not proclaim,—­a meaning as untold as ever.

It is fearful, too, to know, as you look, that whatever has been swallowed by the cataract is like to rise suddenly to light here, whether uprooted tree, or body of man or bird.

The rapids enchanted me far beyond what I expected; they are so swift that they cease to seem so; you can think only of their beauty.  The fountain beyond the Moss Islands I discovered for myself, and thought it for some time an accidental beauty which it would not do to leave, lest I might never see it again.  After I found it permanent, I returned many times to watch the play of its crest.  In the little waterfall beyond, Nature seems, as she often does, to have made a study for some larger design.  She delights in this,—­a sketch within a sketch, a dream within a dream.  Wherever we see it, the lines of the great buttress in the fragment of stone, the hues of the waterfall copied in the flowers that star its bordering mosses, we are delighted; for all the lineaments become fluent, and we mould the scene in congenial thought with its genius.

People complain of the buildings at Niagara, and fear to see it further deformed.  I cannot sympathize with such an apprehension:  the spectacle is capable of swallowing up all such objects; they are not seen in the great whole, more than an earthworm in a wide field.

The beautiful wood on Goat Island is full of flowers; many of the fairest love to do homage here.  The Wake-robin and May-apple are in bloom now; the former, white, pink, green, purple, copying the rainbow of the fall, and fit to make a garland for its presiding deity when he walks the land, for they are of imperial size, and shaped like stones for a diadem.  Of the May-apple, I did not raise one green tent without finding a flower beneath.

And now farewell.  Niagara.  I have seen thee, and I think all who come here must in some sort see thee; thou art not to be got rid of as easily as the stars.  I will be here again beneath some flooding July moon and sun.  Owing to the absence of light, I have seen the rainbow only two or three times by day; the lunar bow not at all.  However, the imperial presence needs not its crown, though illustrated by it.