“The thoughts are strange that crowd into my brain, While I look upward to thee. It would seem As if God poured thee from his hollow hand, And hung his bow upon thine awful front; And spoke in that loud voice which seemed to him Who dwelt in Patmos for his Saviour’s sake, The sound of many waters; and had bade Thy flood to chronicle the ages back, And notch his centuries in the eternal rocks. Deep calleth unto deep. And what are we, That hear the question of that voice sublime? Oh! what are all the notes that ever rung From war’s vain trumpet, by thy thundering side? Yea, what is all the riot man can make, In his short life, to thy unceasing roar? And yet, Bold Babbler! what art thou to Him, Who drowned a world, and heaped the waters far Above its loftiest mountains?--a light wave, That breaks, and whispers of its Maker’s might.” It has been remarked that at Niagara, several objects composing the chief beauty of other celebrated water-falls are altogether wanting. There are no cliffs reaching to an extraordinary height, crowned with trees, or broken into picturesque and varied forms; for, though one of the banks is wooded, the forest scenery on the whole is not imposing. The accompaniments, in short, rank here as nothing. There is merely the display, on a scale elsewhere unrivaled, of the phenomena appropriate to this class of objects. There is the spectacle of a falling sea, the eye filled almost to its utmost reach by the rushing of mighty waters. There is the awful plunge into the abyss beneath, and the reverberation thence in endless lines of foam, and in numberless whirlpools and eddies; there are clouds of spray that fill the whole atmosphere, amid which the most brilliant rainbows, in rapid succession, glitter and disappear; above all, there is the stupendous sound, of the peculiar character of which all writers, with their utmost efforts, seem to have vainly attempted to convey an idea. Bouchette describes it as “grand, commanding and majestic, filling the vault of heaven when heard in its fullness”--as “a deep, round roar, and alternation of muffled and open sounds, to which there is nothing exactly corresponding.” Captain Hall compares it to the ceaseless, rumbling, deep-monotonous sound of a vast mill, which, though not very practical, is generally considered as approaching near to the reality. Dr. Reed states, “it is not like the sea; nor like the thunder; nor like any thing I have heard. There is no roar, no rattle; nothing sharp or angry in its tones; it is deep, awful--One.” The diffusion of the noise varies according to the state of the atmosphere and the direction of the wind, but it may be heard under favorable circumstances through a distance of forty-six miles: at Toronto, across Lake Ontario.