Our journey down the southern bank of the river was extremely pleasant. The banks are low {291} and verdant to the water’s edge, and the margin, in most parts, forming fine curves, smooth as if finished by art. The islands are also low and covered with luxuriant timber. It is the extent of water-prospect, bounded in every direction by woods, that constitutes the grandeur of this part. At the lower extremity of Grand Island, the sheet of water seems to be about three miles broad. The soil is good, and yields better pasturage and hay than the lands of the more southern parts of the continent. A happy compensation for the severity of the northern winter. On approaching within two or three miles of the falls, a cloud of spray is to be seen rising 600 or 700 feet into the air. At that distance, the noise of the waters has something like the effect of a strong wind among the trees of a forest. Immediately above the precipice, there is an island beautifully wooded, with a mixture of white cedars and other evergreen trees, which divides the river into two unequal parts, leaving the principal channel toward the Canadian shore. The head of this island, and the beach of the United States side of the river, are connected by a rude wooden bridge, which must have been constructed with great difficulty, as the bottom is of rock, and the water runs with great velocity. On both sides of the island the declivity is great, and the furious stream is broken at intervals by falling over shelving rocks. The division of the rapids toward the Canadian side, would have been remarked as highly interesting, had it been situated somewhere else than immediately adjoining to the great falls of Niagara. The stranger, on arriving at the point of land close at the head of the cataract, and that juts over {292} the tremendous abyss, is in a moment arrested by the awful grandeur of the scene, or if he is at all inclined to motion, it is to recede from the precipice. The sight of an immense volume of water poured over a perpendicular cliff, situated almost under his feet,[164] into the chasm below, and the thundering noise, are calculated to excite a degree of astonishment that borders on dismay. The part of the river which passes between the island and the south-easterly shore, falls over the abrupt edge of a precipice that has a few small gaps in it; the water discharged is necessarily deep in these, and forms green columns, which descend twenty or thirty feet before they assume the whiteness that is uniform over other parts of the sheet that here spends its fury on a heap of large blocks which have been undermined and detached from the rocks above. A vast body of dense spray deflected from those large masses of stone, flies off horizontally, and in every other direction, and completely obscures the bottom of the fall, and a considerable portion of the chasm adjoining.