You can descend a staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and stand at
the edge of the water. After you have done it, you will wonder why you did it;
but you will then be too late.
- "Niagara," Sketches Old and New
There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to display one's
marvelous insignificance in a good strong light, but it requires a sort of superhuman
self-complacency to enable one to do it.
- "Niagara," Sketches Old and New
I had to visit Niagara fifteen times before I succeeded in getting my imaginary Falls gauged to the actuality and could begin to sanely and wholesomely wonder at them for what they were, not what I had expected them to be. When I first approached them it was with my face lifted toward the sky, for I thought I was going to see an Atlantic ocean pouring down thence over cloud-vexed Himalayan heights, a sea-green wall of water sixty miles front and six miles high, and so, when the toy reality came suddenly into view--that beruffled little wet apron hanging out to dry--the shock was too much for me, and I fell with a dull thud.
Yet slowly, surely, steadily, in the course of my fifteen visits, the proportions
adjusted themselves to the facts, and I came at last to realize that a waterfall
a hundred and sixty-five feet high and a quarter of a mile wide was an impressive
thing. It was not a dipperful to my vanished great vision, but it would answer.
- Following the Equator
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