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." And, 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 loitered, eyeing with their
glasses, or sketching on cards the hoary locks of the ancient river god.
All tended to harmonize with the natural grandeur of the scene. I gazed
long. I saw how here mutability and unchangeableness were united. I
surveyed the conspiring waters rushing against the rocky ledge to
overthrow it at one mad plunge, till, like toppling ambition,