shore, and commanded a perfect view of the falls.  As they entered this pavilion, a youth and maiden, clearly lovers, passed out, and they were left alone with that sublime presence.  Something of definiteness was to be desired in the spectacle, but there was ample compensation in the mystery with which the broad effulgence and the dense unluminous shadows of the moonshine invested it.  The light touched all the tops of the rapids, that seemed to writhe sway from the brink of the cataract, and then desperately breaking and perishing to fall, the white disembodied ghosts of rapids, down to the bottom of the vast and deep ravine through which the river rushed away.  Now the waters seemed to mass themselves a hundred feet high in a wall of snowy compactness, now to disperse into their multitudinous particles and hang like some vaporous cloud from the cliff.  Every moment renewed the vision of beauty in some rare and fantastic shape; and its loveliness isolated it, in spite of the great town on the other shore, the station with its bridge and its trains, the mills that supplied their feeble little needs from the cataract’s strength.

At last Basil pointed out the table-rock in the middle of the fall, from which Sam Patch had made his fatal leap; but Isabel refused to admit that tragical figure to the honors of her emotions.  “I don’t care for him!” she said fiercely.  “Patch!  What a name to be linked in our thoughts with this superb cataract.”

“Well, Isabel, I think you are very unjust.  It’s as good a name as Leander, to my thinking, and it was immortalized in support of a great idea, the feasibility of all things; while Leander’s has come down to us as that of the weak victim of a passion.  We shall never have a poetry of our own till we get over this absurd reluctance from facts, till we make the ideal embrace and include the real, till we consent to face the music in our simple common names, and put Smith into a lyric and Jones into a tragedy.  The Germans are braver than we, and in them you find facts and dreams continually blended and confronted.  Here is a fortunate illustration.  The people we met coming out of this pavilion were lovers, and they had been here sentimentalizing on this superb cataract, as you call it, with which my heroic Patch is not worthy to be named.  No doubt they had been quoting Uhland or some other of their romantic poets, perhaps singing some of their tender German love-songs,—­the tenderest, unearthliest love-songs in the world.  At the same time they did not disdain the matter-of-fact corporeity in which their sentiment was enshrined; they fed it heartily and abundantly with the banquet whose relics we see here.”

On a table before them stood a pair of beer-glasses, in the bottoms of which lurked scarce the foam of the generous liquor lately brimming them; some shreds of sausage, some rinds of Swiss cheese, bits of cold ham, crusts of bread, and the ashes of a pipe.

Isabel shuddered at the spectacle, but made no comment, and Basil went on:  “Do you suppose they scorned the idea of Sam Patch as they gazed upon the falls?  On the contrary, I’ve no doubt that he recalled to her the ballad which a poet of their language made about him.  It used to go the rounds of the German newspapers, and I translated it, a long while ago, when I thought that I too was in ‘Arkadien geboren’.