nature has erected to its God.

At last, slowly and thoughtfully I walked down to the bridge leading
to Goat Island, and when I stood upon this frail support, and saw
a quarter of a mile of tumbling, rushing rapids, and heard their
everlasting roar, my emotions overpowered me, a choking sensation rose
to my throat, a thrill rushed through my veins, "my blood ran rippling
to my fingers' ends." This was the climax of the effect which the
falls produced upon me,--neither the American nor the British fall
moved me as did these rapids. For the magnificence, the sublimity of
the latter, I was prepared by descriptions and by paintings. When I
arrived in sight of them I merely felt, "Ah, yes! here is the fall,
just as I have seen it in a picture." When I arrived at the Terrapin
Bridge, I expected to be overwhelmed, to retire trembling from this
giddy eminence, and gaze with unlimited wonder and awe upon the
immense mass rolling on and on; but, somehow or other, I thought only
of comparing the effect on my mind with what I had read and heard.
I looked for a short time, and then, with almost a feeling of
disappointment, turned to go to the other points of view, to see if I
was not mistaken in not feeling any surpassing emotion at this sight.
But from the foot of Biddle's Stairs, and the middle of the river, and
from below the Table Rock, it was still "barren, barren all."

Provoked with my stupidity in feeling most moved in the wrong place,
I turned away to the hotel, determined to set off for Buffalo that
afternoon. But the stage did not go, and, after nightfall, as there
was a splendid moon, I went down to the bridge, and leaned over the
parapet, where the boiling rapids came down in their might. It was
grand, and it was also gorgeous; the yellow rays of the moon made
the broken waves appear like auburn tresses twining around the black
rocks. But they did not inspire me as before. I felt a foreboding of a
mightier emotion to rise up and swallow all others, and I passed on to
the Terrapin Bridge. Everything was changed, the misty apparition had
taken off its many-colored crown which it had worn by day, and a bow
of silvery white spanned its summit. The moonlight gave a poetical
indefiniteness to the distant parts of the waters, and while the
rapids were glancing in her beams, the river below the falls was black
as night, save where the reflection of the sky gave it the appearance
of a shield of blued steel. No gaping tourists