he leans on his elbows, and watches the yeasty writhe in the abysm, and the solemn pillars of crystal eternally falling, like the fragments of some palace-crested star, descending through interminable space. The white field of the iris forms over the brow of the cataract, exhibits its radiant bow, and sails away in a vanishing cloud of vapour upon the wind; the tortured and convulsed surface of the caldron below shoots out its frothy and seething circles in perpetual torment; the thunders are heaped upon each other, the earth trembles, and—the bell rings for breakfast! A vision of cold rolls, clammy omelettes, and tepid tea, succeeds these sublime images, and the traveller completes his toilet. Breakfast over, he resorts to the colonnade, to contemplate untiringly the scene before him, and in the midst of a calculation of the progress of the Fall towards Lake Erie,—with the perspiration standing on his forehead, while he struggles to conceive the junction of its waters with Lake Ontario,—the rocks rent, the hills swept away, forests prostrated, and the islands uprooted in the mighty conflux,—some one’s child escapes from its nurse, and seizing him by the legs, cries out “_Da-da_.” The _ennui_ attendant upon public-houses can never be felt at Clifton House. The most common mind finds the spectacle from its balconies a sufficient and untiring occupation. The loneliness of uninhabited parlours, the discord of baby-thrummed pianos, the dreariness of great staircases, long entries, and bar-rooms filled with strangers, are pains and penalties of travel never felt at Niagara. If there is a vacant half-hour to dinner, or if indisposition to sleep create that sickening yearning for society, which sometimes comes upon a stranger in a strange land, like the calenture of a fever,—the eternal marvel going on without is more engrossing than friend or conversation, more beguiling from sad thought than the Corso in carnival-time. To lean over the balustrade and watch the flying of the ferry-boat below, with its terrified freight of adventurers, one moment gliding swiftly down the stream in the round of an eddy, the next, lifted up by a boiling wave, as if it were tossed up from the scoop of a giant’s hand beneath the water; to gaze hour after hour into the face of the cataract, to trace the rainbows, delight like a child in the shooting spray-clouds, and calculate fruitlessly and endlessly by the force, weight, speed, and change of the tremendous waters,—is amusement and occupation enough to draw the mind from any thing,—to cure madness or create it. [Illustration] VIEW FROM HYDE PARK. * * * * *