During the fall of 1843, Mr. Ballou, then at the age of seventy-two years, made a long journey to the West, to attend the national convention of Universalists, held at Akron, Ohio. On the route thither, in company with Rev. Thomas Whittemore and some other friends, he visited, for the first time, Niagara Falls. Mr. Whittemore, in writing home a description of their visit to his paper, the Trumpet, said:--"When we came to Table Rock, Father Ballou stood in amazement, and when we urged him to go back over the river before dark, 'Oh!' said he, 'how can I go away?' He said his thoughts were like those of Peter on one occasion: 'It is good to be here; let us build tabernacles, and dwell upon the spot.' A prism was handed to him, through which he could see the rapids in colors ineffably glorious. 'Oh! my soul! oh! glory to God!' were his exclamations." No man had a more thorough appreciation of all that was grand and noble in nature, no one a keener eye for her myriads of charms that gladden our daily lives and illumine the pathway of life. "We heard him, for the first time," says the editor of the American Phrenological Journal, "at a Universalist general convention, Akron, Ohio, in September, 1843, where he preached to a very large gathering, with the ablest men in the denomination preceding and following him. Many of them delivered more elaborate and carefully studied discourses, but there was no other who made the brown faces of the old farmers so fairly _shine_ with admiration and delight as 'Father Ballou.' Many of them had heard him in New England thirty or forty years previous, and now, hearing that he was to attend the convention, had come thirty or forty miles to listen to him once again, and for the last time on earth. Though then past man's allotted period of 'threescore years and ten,' his distinctness of utterance, clearness of statement, aptness of illustration, and force of argument, might well have been taken as a model by a young preacher; and, though he spoke more than an hour, a very general regret was evident that he closed so soon. In person Mr. Ballou was tall and slight, with a bearing of unaffected meekness and humility."