The fourth line but renders the matter worse, for here the figure is most inartistically shifted. The handful of water becomes animate; for it has a front—that is, a forehead, and upon this forehead the Deity proceeds to hang a bow, that is, a rainbow. At the same time he “speaks in that loud voice, &c.;” and here it is obvious that the ideas of the writer are in a sad state of fluctuation; for he transfers the idiosyncrasy of the fall itself (that is to say its sound) to the one who pours it from his hand. But not content with all this, Mr. Brainard commands the flood to _keep a kind of tally_; for this is the low thought which the expression about “notching in the rocks” immediately and inevitably induces. The whole of this first division of the poem, embraces, we hesitate not to say, one of the most jarring, inappropriate, mean, and in every way monstrous assemblages of false imagery, which can be found out of the tragedies of Nat Lee, or the farces of Thomas Carlyle. In the latter division, the poet recovers himself, as if ashamed of his previous bombast. His natural instinct (for Brainard was no artist) has enabled him _to feel_ that _subjects which surpass in grandeur all efforts of the human imagination are well depicted only in the simplest and least metaphorical language_—a proposition as susceptible of demonstration as any in Euclid. Accordingly, we find a material sinking in tone; although he does not at once, discard all imagery. The “Deep calleth unto deep” is nevertheless a great improvement upon his previous rhetoricianism. The personification of the waters above and below would be good in reference to any subject less august. The moral reflections which immediately follow, have at least the merit of simplicity: but the poet exhibits no very lofty imagination when he bases these reflections only upon the cataract’s superiority to man _in the noise it can create_; nor is the concluding idea more spirited, where the mere difference between the quantity of water which occasioned the flood, and the quantity which Niagara precipitates, is made the measure of the Almighty Mind’s superiority to that cataract which it called by a thought into existence.