e-shoe; I do not purpose clothing you in
Mackintosh, and dragging you with trembling steps along the slimy
pathway between the Falls and the rock, to gaze on the sun through the
roaring and rolling flood; nor will I draw upon your nerves by a detail
of the hair-breadth escapes of Mr. Bumptious and Mrs. Positive, who,
when they got half-way along the said path, were seized with panic, and
only escaped a header into the boiling caldron by lying flat on their
stomachs until the rest of the party had lionized the whole distance,
when the guide returned and hauled them out by the heels, like drowned
rats out of a sink-hole; nor will I ask you to walk five miles with me,
to see the wooden hut, built over a sulphur spring within ten feet of
the river, and which is lit by the sulphuretted hydrogen gas thereof,
led through a simple tube.

All these, and the rapids above, and the whirlpool below, and the
four-and-a-half million horse-power of the Falls, have been so often
described by abler pens and more fertile imaginations, that the effort
would be a failure and the result a bore.

I have in my possession a collection from the various albums at
Niagara; it opens with the following lines by Lord Morpeth, now Earl of
Carlisle--

"There's nothing great or bright, thou glorious Fall!
Thou may'st not to the fancy's sense recal;
The thunder-riven cloud, the lightning's leap,
The stirring of the chambers of the deep,
Earth's emerald green, and many-tinted dyes,
The fleecy whiteness of the upper skies,
The tread of armies thickening as they come,
The boom of cannon and the beat of drum,
The brow of beauty and the form of grace,
The passion and the prowess of our race,
The song of Homer in its loftiest hour,
The unresisted sweep of human power,
Britannia's trident on the azure sea,
America's young shout of liberty!
Oh! may the waves that madden in thy deep,
There spend their rage, nor climb the encircling steep,--
And till the conflict of thy surges cease,
The nations on thy banks repose in peace!"

There are other effusions equally creditable to their authors; but there
is also a mass of rubbish, from which I will only inflict two specimens.
One, evidently from the pen of a Cockney; and the other, the poetical
inspiration of a free and enlightened.

Cockney poet--

"Next to the bliss of seeing Sarah,
Is that of seeing Niagara."

Free and enlightened--

"Of all the roaring, pour