The Prose Works of William Wordsworth eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,714 pages of information about The Prose Works of William Wordsworth.
of a mountain storm.  We soon reached an inn at a place called Hardrane, and descending from our vehicles, after warming ourselves by the cottage fire, we walked up the brook-side to take a view of a third waterfall.  We had not walked above a few hundred yards between two winding rocky banks, before we came full upon the waterfall, which seemed to throw itself in a narrow line from a lofty wall of rock, the water, which shot manifestly to some distance from the rock, seeming to be dispersed into a thin shower scarcely visible before it reached the bason.  We were disappointed in the cascade itself, though the introductory and accompanying banks were an exquisite mixture of grandeur and beauty.  We walked up to the fall; and what would I not give if I could convey to you the feelings and images which were then communicated to me?  After cautiously sounding our way over stones of all colours and sizes, encased in the clearest water formed by the spray of the fall, we found the rock, which before had appeared like a wall, extending itself over our heads, like the ceiling of a huge cave, from the summit of which the waters shot directly over our heads into a bason, and among fragments wrinkled over with masses of ice as white as snow, or rather, as Dorothy says, like congealed froth.  The water fell at least ten yards from us, and we stood directly behind it, the excavation not so deep in the rock as to impress any feeling of darkness, but lofty and magnificent; but in connection with the adjoining banks excluding as much of the sky as could well be spared from a scene so exquisitely beautiful.  The spot where we stood was as dry as the chamber in which I am now sitting, and the incumbent rock, of which the groundwork was limestone, veined and dappled with colours which melted into each other with every possible variety of colour.  On the summit of the cave were three festoons, or rather wrinkles, in the rock, run up parallel like the folds of a curtain when it is drawn up.  Each of these was hung with icicles of various length, and nearly in the middle of the festoon in the deepest valley of the waves that ran parallel to each other, the stream shot from the rows of icicles in irregular fits of strength, and with a body of water that varied every moment.  Sometimes the stream shot into the bason in one continued current; sometimes it was interrupted almost in the midst of its fall, and was blown towards part of the waterfall at no great distance from our feet like the heaviest thunder-shower.  In such a situation you have at every moment a feeling of the presence of the sky.  Large fleecy clouds drove over our heads above the rush of the water, and the sky appeared of a blue more than usually brilliant.  The rocks on each side, which, joining with the side of this cave, formed the vista of the brook, were chequered with three diminutive waterfalls, or rather courses of water.  Each of these was a miniature of all that summer and winter can produce of delicate beauty. 
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The Prose Works of William Wordsworth from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.