hey saw a white
cloud of spray, shot through and through with sunset, rising, rising,
and she felt her voice softly and steadily beaten down by the diapason
of the cataract.

I am not sure but the first emotion on viewing Niagara is that of
familiarity. Ever after, its strangeness increases; but in that earliest
moment when you stand by the side of the American fall, and take in so
much of the whole as your giants can compass, an impression of having
seen it often before is certainly very vivid. This may be an effect of
that grandeur which puts you at your ease in its presence; but it
also undoubtedly results in part from lifelong acquaintance with every
variety of futile picture of the scene. You have its outward form
clearly in your memory; the shores, the rapids, the islands, the curve
of the Falls, and the stout rainbow with one end resting on their top
and the other lost in the mists that rise from the gulf beneath. On
the whole I do not account this sort of familiarity a misfortune. The
surprise is none the less a surprise because it is kept till the last,
and the marvel, making itself finally felt in every nerve, and not at
once through a single sense, all the more fully possesses you. It is as
if Niagara reserved her magnificence, and preferred to win your heart
with her beauty; and so Isabel, who was instinctively prepared for the
reverse, suffered a vague disappointment, for a little instant, as she
looked along the verge from the water that caressed the shore at her
feet before it flung itself down, to the wooded point that divides the
American from the Canadian Fall, beyond which showed dimly through
its veil of golden and silver mists the emerald wall of the great
Horse-Shoe. "How still it is!" she said, amidst the roar that shook the
ground under their feet and made the leaves tremble overhead, and "How
lonesome!" amidst the people lounging and sauntering about in every
direction among the trees. In fact that prodigious presence does make
a solitude and silence round every spirit worthy to perceive it, and
it gives a kind of dignity to all its belongings, so that the rocks and
pebbles in the water's edge, and the weeds and grasses that nod above
it, have a value far beyond that of such common things elsewhere. In all
the aspects of Niagara there seems a grave simplicity, which is perhaps
a reflection of the spectator's soul for once utterly dismantled of
affectation and convention. In the vulgar reaction f