It would be presumptuous in any man to attempt a regular description of Niagara Falls, with the expectation of doing the subject justice—much more so in the unpretending John Smith. No one can form a fair idea of the mighty cataract without having seen it. Nor will one mere glance be sufficient. You may spend whole days there before you arrive at a just appreciation of it. The mind cannot grasp it at once. A friend had told me that I should, on first visiting Niagara, experience a sense of disappointment—that the Falls would not appear quite equal to their reputation and my consequent anticipations; but that, by and by, as I should come to contemplate them more maturely, I should be led to regard them as infinitely grander and more majestic, than my loftiest anticipations had painted them. I found it true. As the train approached, I heard the roar of the cataract, and saw the green waters tumbling down with their white robes of spray; but I somehow thought they did not come up to my expectations, or rather experienced a vague, indescribable impression that I had seen the like before. But when I walked down to the bank, stood in the midst of the mighty thunder, felt the earth tremble beneath the giant leap of the great river, saw the dashing spray, arising like clouds of smoke and dust from the sudden ruin of some great city; when I remembered that for ages and ages, from time lost in dim obscurity, day and night, winter and summer, never ceasing, never tiring, the mighty waters had been tumbling and plunging down from the dizzy height, as now; and when I thought of the future, when I mused of the unknown ages to come, fancied generation after generation to have passed away; when I imagined this great round sphere to have made thousands of annual revolutions around the sun, and pictured the grand old cataract, with none of its vigor lost in the maze of centuries, still thundering away, with the same old strength, young, mighty, glorious, majestic as ever: then did I begin to realize the magnitude of the lofty cataract, the work of the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth, and feel the littleness, the nothingness, of man! The following lines written in the immediate presence of the great cataract, by David Paul Brown, Jr., Esquire, of the Philadelphia Bar, are highly worthy of perusal: