e terrible conflict between the contending elements, and create the
largest steam-boiler that ever entered into the imagination of man.

I have no doubt that the opinion that these falls have receded a
distance of seven miles is correct; but what time must have passed
before even this tremendous power could have sawed away such a mass of
solid rock! Within the memory of man it has receded but a few feet--
changed but little. How many thousand years must these waters have been
flowing and falling, unvarying in their career, and throwing up their
sheets of spray to heaven.

It is impossible for either the eye or the mind to compass the whole
mass of falling water; you cannot measure, cannot estimate its enormous
volume; and this is the reason, perhaps, why travellers often express
themselves disappointed by it. But fix your eye upon one portion--one
falling and heaving wave out of the millions, as they turn over the edge
of the rocks; watch, I say, this fragment for a few minutes, its regular
time-beating motion never varying or changing; pursuing the laws of
nature with a regularity never ceasing and never tiring; minute after
minute; hour after hour; day after day; year after year, until time
recedes into creation: then cast your eyes over the whole multitudinous
mass which is, and has been, performing the same and coeval duty, and
you feel its vastness! Still the majesty of the whole is far too great
for the mind to compass--too stupendous for its limited powers of
reception.

Sunday.--I had intended to have passed the whole day at the Falls; but
an old gentleman whose acquaintance I had made in the steam boat on Lake
Ontario, asked me to go to church; and as I felt he would be annoyed if
I did not, I accompanied him to a Presbyterian meeting not far from the
Falls, which sounded like distant thunder. The sermon was upon
temperance--a favourite topic in America; and the minister rather
quaintly observed, that "alcohol was not sealed by the hand of God." It
was astonishing to me that he did not allude to the Falls, point out
that the seal of God was there, and shew how feeble was the voice of man
when compared to the thunder of the Almighty so close at hand. But the
fact was, he had been accustomed to preach every Sunday with the Falls
roaring in his ear, and (when the wind was in a certain quarter,) with
the spray damping the leaves of his sermon: he therefore did not feel as
we did, and, no doubt, thought his