Niagara is seen to advantage in a severe winter. It is impossible for ice to accumulate in front of the Canadian fall; but as vast masses are formed all about the American, the contrast between the two becomes far greater and more striking than in summer. According to the figures usually given, the American is only one third the width of the Canadian; but this measurement gives no idea of the difference between the two, which lies chiefly in the fact that the sheet of water which comes over the former is so thin that it is everywhere broken, and white with foam; while in the Canadian fall it comes over in so deep and solid a mass, that it is green throughout the whole Horse-shoe. It is perfectly smooth, and there is not a bubble visible upon it. Every piece of wood that comes over seems to glide down its surface; the water itself being so unbroken as to appear almost as if it were stationary and had no movement in it. I do not know any other grand object of nature where the interest felt at the moment in what is seen is so much heightened by what is not seen, as in these great falls. They are grand in themselves to the eye; but how much grander does the sight become, when it is accompanied by the thought that what you see is the collected outflow of all those vast lakes it has been taking you so many days to steam over and along, lakes on all of which you lost sight of the land, just as if you had been on the ocean itself, lakes larger than European kingdoms. Here you have before you, gliding over that precipice, all the water these great seas, fed by a thousand streams, are unable to retain in their own basins. [Sidenote: _Niagara._] And behind you, in the seven miles from Queenston, you have in the deep perpendicular-sided trough, cut in the solid limestone rock, a measure of the excavating power of this descending flood, which has been for so many ages, just like a chisel in a carpenter’s hand (the Horse-shoe fall is now a gouge), chipping out this deep and wide channel. When one reflects on the enormous weight of the falling water, surprise is felt at its not working at a greater rate than, as is supposed, that of twelve inches in twelve months. When I was at Niagara there was what is called an ‘ice bridge’ a few yards below the falls, and which, as it requires a continuance of severe weather for its completion, does not occur, I was told, more frequently than once in every nine or ten years. I stayed at an hotel on the American side of the Suspension Bridge, which is about a mile and a half from the falls. I was there three days, and during that time I met two Canadians who had all their lives been in the neighbourhood of the falls, and an American in business at the place where I was staying, who had not yet seen the great sight, and who felt no desire to see it.