see the platform across the bottom-now a cloud of mist blots it out. And it roars so! Come, Fishermen, Mermaids, Naiads, Firemen and Undine, down! down! Cling to the railing! Lean on me! Thou gossamer blossom which the softest summer zephyr would thrill, whither will these mad gales beneath the Cataract whirl thee! We are here upon the narrow platform; it is railed upon each side, and the drops dash like sleet, like acute hail, against our faces. The swift sweep of the water across the floor would slide us also into the yawning gulf beyond, but clinging with our hands, we move securely as in calm airs. And now look uf, for you stand directly beneath the urching water, directly under the fall. The rock is hollowed, and the round pebbles on the ground rush and rattle with the sliding water as on the sea-beach. You leave the platform, you climb between two rocks, and sliding along a staging, unstable almost as the water, yet quite firm enough, you stand directly upon the rocks, and Niagara plunges and tumbles above you and around you. There at sunset, and only there, you may see three circular rainbows, one within another. For Niagara has unimagined boons for her lovers-rewards of beauty so profound that she enjoins silence as the proof of fidelity. Returning, there is an overhanging shelf of rock, and there, except that it is cold and wet, you sit secluded from the spray. It is a lonely cave, curtained from the sun by the Cataract, forever. And if still your daring is untamed, you may climb over slippery rocks in the blinding mist and the deafening roar, and feel yourself as far under the Great American Fall as human foot may venture. I must stop. If you have been at Niagara, what I have written may recall it, but can hardly paint, except to remembrance, the austere grandeur and dreamy beauties which are its characteristics. Your few days there are days upon the river bank, walking and wondering. Your frail fancies of it are swallowed up as they rise, like chance flowers flung upon its current. Many a man to whom Niagara has been a hope, and an inspiration, and who has stood before its majesty awe-stricken and hushed, secretly wonders that his words describing it are not pictures and poems. But any great natural objecta cataract, an Alp, a storm at sea-are seed too vast for any sudden flowering. They lie in experience moulding life. At length the pure peaks of noble aims and the broad flow of a generous manhood betray that in some happy hour of youth you have seen the Alps and Niagara. VII. Saratoga. AUGUST. ILT thou be a nun, Sophie? Nothing but a nun? Is it not a better thing With thy friends to laugh and sing To be loved and sought? To be wooed and-won? Dost thou love the shadow, Sophie? ROMANCE is the necessary association of watering-places, because they are the haunts of youth and beauty seeking pleasure. When on some opaline May day you drive out from Naples to Baiæ, the Saratoga of old Rome, and in the golden light of the waning afternoon drink Falernian while you look upon the vineyards where it ripened for Horace, your fancy is thronged with the images of Romance, and you could listen to catch some echo. of a long silent love-song, lingering in the air. It is a kind of sentimentality inseparable from the |