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