Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir
History
Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir
Great Britain -- Colonies -- History -- 19th century; United States -- Description and travel; Voyages around the world
The view from the Parliament-house is even more thoroughly Canadian than
that from the terrace at Quebec--a view of a land of rapids, of pine
forests, and of lumberers’ homes, full of character, but somewhat bleak
and dreary; even on the hottest summer‘s day, it tells of winter storms
past and to come. On the far left are the island-filled reaches of the
Upper Ottawa; nearer, the roaring Chaudière Falls, a mile across--a mile
of walls of water, of sudden shoots, of jets, of spray. From the
“caldron” itself, into which we can hardly see, rises a column of
rainbow-tinted mist, backed by distant ranges and black woods, now fast
falling before the settler‘s axe. Below you is the river, swift, and
covered with cream-like foam; on the right, a gorge--the mouth of the
Rideau Canal.
When surveyed from the fittest points, the Chaudière is but little
behind Niagara; but it may be doubted whether in any fall there is that
which can be called sublimity. Natural causes are too evident; water,
rushing to find its level, falls from a ledge of rock. How different
from a storm upon the coast, or from a September sunset, where the
natural causes are so remote that you can bring yourself almost to see
the immediate hand of God! It is excusable in Americans, who have no
sea-coast worthy of the name, to talk of Niagara as the perfection of
the sublime; but it is strange that a people who have Birling Gap and
Bantry Bay should allow themselves to be led by such a cry.
Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached by the great
Chaudière: the awesome slowness with which the deep-green flood, in the
center of the Horseshoe Fall, rolls rather than plunges into the gulf.
CHAPTER VII.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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