State Street is at present a street of banks, insurance offices, and similar institutions; and its side walk serves for the merchants’ exchange. The buildings are of granite, and some of them, particularly a new bank, lately erected near Kilby Street, present very creditable specimens of city architecture. [Illustration] NIAGARA FALLS, FROM CLIFTON HOUSE. * * * * * The most comprehensive view of Niagara is, no doubt, that from the galleries of this hotel; but it is, at the same time, for a first view, one of the most unfavourable. Clifton House stands nearly opposite the centre of the irregular crescent formed by the Falls; but it is so far back from the line of the arc, that the height and grandeur of the two cataracts, to an eye unacquainted with the scene, are deceptively diminished. After once making the tour of the points of view, however, the distance and elevation of the hotel are allowed for by the eye, and the situation seems most advantageous. This is the only house at Niagara where a traveller, on his second visit, would be content to live. Clifton House is kept in the best style of hotels in this country; but the usual routine of such places, going on in the very eye of Niagara, weaves in very whimsically with the eternal presence and power of the cataract. We must eat, drink, and sleep, it is true, at Niagara as elsewhere; and indeed, what with the exhaustion of mind and fatigue of body, we require at the Falls perhaps more than usual of these three “blessed inventions.” The leaf that is caught away by the Rapids, however, is not more entirely possessed by this wonder of nature, than is the mind and imagination of the traveller; and the arrest of that leaf by the touch of the overhanging tree, or the point of a rock amid the breakers, is scarce more momentary than the interruption to the traveller’s enchantment by the circumstances of daily life. He falls asleep with its surging thunders in his ear, and wakes—to wonder, for an instant, if his yesterday’s astonishment was a dream. With the succeeding thought, his mind refills, like a mountain channel, whose torrent has been suspended by the frost, and he is overwhelmed with sensations that are almost painful, from the suddenness of their return. He rises and throws up his window, and there it flashes, and thunders, and agonizes—the same almighty miracle of grandeur for ever going on; and he turns and wonders—What the deuce can have become of his stockings! He slips on his dressing-gown, and commences his toilet. The glass stands in the window, and with his beard half achieved, he gets a glimpse of the foam-cloud rising majestically over the top of the mahogany frame. Almost persuaded, like Queen Christina at the fountains of St. Peter’s, that a spectacle of such splendour is not intended to last, he drops his razor, and with the soap drying unheeded on his chin,