and Montmorenci: the former is a prodigious sheet of water, rushing
over the wildest rocks, and forming a scene grotesque, irregular,
astonishing: the latter, less wild, less irregular, but more pleasing
and more majestic, falls from an immense height, down the side of a
romantic mountain, into the river St. Lawrence, opposite the most
smiling part of the island of Orleans, to the cultivated charms of
which it forms the most striking and agreeable contrast.

The river of the same name, which supplies the cascade of
Montmorenci, is the most lovely of all inanimate objects: but why do
I call it inanimate? It almost breathes; I no longer wonder at the
enthusiasm of Greece and Rome; 'twas from objects resembling this their
mythology took its rise; it seems the residence of a thousand deities.

Paint to yourself a stupendous rock burst as it were in sunder by
the hands of nature, to give passage to a small, but very deep and
beautiful river; and forming on each side a regular and magnificent
wall, crowned with the noblest woods that can be imagined; the sides of
these romantic walls adorned with a variety of the gayest flowers, and
in many places little streams of the purest water gushing through, and
losing themselves in the river below: a thousand natural grottoes in
the rock make you suppose yourself in the abode of the Nereids; as a
little island, covered with flowering shrubs, about a mile above the
falls, where the river enlarges itself as if to give it room, seems
intended for the throne of the river goddess. Beyond this, the rapids,
formed by the irregular projections of the rock, which in some places
seem almost to meet, rival in beauty, as they excel in variety, the
cascade itself, and close this little world of enchantment.

In short, the loveliness of this fairy scene alone more than pays