f
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.