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, eyeing with their glasses, or sketching on cards the hoary locks of the ancient river-god.  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’er-leaping themselves, they fall on t’ other side, expanding into foam ere they reach the deep channel where they creep submissively away.