the sinking day. But the
finest combined effects of beauty and grandeur are, perhaps, most fully
felt when, late in the afternoon, the eye wanders delighted over the vast
combination of lofty cliffs and falling waters to rest finally far above
on the iris tints of the Rajah and Roarer Falls, through the colours of
which myriads of swallows incessantly wheel on lightsome wing, mingled
with the quick, darting movement of the Alpine swifts, and the gentle
flight of the blue rock pigeons, which occasionally wing their way through
the mazy throng. For there the eye is ever delighted with the charm of
colour and of those endless variations of graceful movement which
continuously convey pleasurable sensations to the mind. But how could eye
or ear ever tire of those rare combinations of form, colour, motion and
rhythmic sounds which fill the mind with an exalted sense of feeling and
of pleasure, and the conscious heart with exquisite sensations far beyond
the power of language to describe?

Presently my companion returned and aroused me from my state of dreamy
pleasure, and I turned reluctantly away from the scene as the rainbow
colours were, with the sinking sun, beginning to disappear from the
topmost heights of the falls.

Delightful indeed were the brilliant and varied scenes I have been
attempting to describe, and after them the remainder was by comparison
tame, but still I found that, as I took a canoe the following evening and
rowed up the forest-margined pool from which the rapids emerge, that the
minor scenes at the falls have exquisite charms of their own. And then it
was that I realized that, varying though the scale may be, there is
everywhere about the falls the same beauty of detail and beauty of
combined effect, and that, too, unaccompanied by a single jarring note.
For nowhere can you say, as you can often say in viewing scenes elsewhere,
"leave out this, or alter that, and the scene would be perfect," and in
none of the scenes about the falls does anything poor, or base, or mean,
or uninteresting strike the eye, and as I rowed slowly up the pool I felt
that the mind was both charmed and soothed by the exquisite repose of the
scene, which is only broken, if indeed it can be said to be broken, by the
beautiful birds and gaily painted kingfishers which occasionally wing
their way across the water, or flit along the margin of the forest-clad
shore. As you look towards the West the eye wanders over the wild
assembl