I was up by daybreak the next morning to see the Falls by sunrise, and was amply repaid for leaving my warm bed, and encountering the bright bracing morning air, by two hours' enjoyment of solemn converse alone with God and Niagara. The sun had not yet lifted his majestic head above the pine forest, or chased with his beams the dark shadows of night that rested within the curved sides of the great Horse-shoe. The waters looked black as they rolled in vast smooth masses downward, till, meeting the projecting rocks, they were tossed high into the air in clouds of dazzling foam--so pure, so stainlessly white, when contrasted with the darkness, that they looked as if belonging to heaven rather than to earth. Anon, that dancing feathery tumult of foam catches a rosy gleam from the coming day. A long stream of sunlight touches the centre of the mighty arch, and transforms the black waters into a mass of smooth transparent emerald green, and the spray flashes with myriads of rubies and diamonds; while the American Fall still rolls and thunders on in cold pure whiteness, Goat Island and its crests of dark pines shrouding it in a robe of gloom. The voice of the waters rising amidst the silence that reigns at that lovely calm hour, sounds sonorous and grand. Be still, O my soul! earth is pouring to her Creator her morning anthem of solemn praise! Earth! how beautiful thou art! When will men be worthy of the paradise in which they are placed? Did our first father, amidst the fresh young beauty of his Eden, ever gaze upon a spectacle more worthy of his admiration than this? We will except those moments when he held converse with God amid the cool shades of that delicious garden. "That's a sublime sight!" said a voice near me. I turned, and found the old American gentleman at my side. "I can see a change in the appearance of these Falls," he continued, "since I visited them some forty years ago. Time changes everything; I feel that I am changed since then. I was young and active, and clambered about these rugged banks with the careless hardihood of a boy who pants for excitement and adventure, and how I enjoyed my visit to this place! A change has taken place--I can scarcely describe in what respect; but it looks to me very different to what it did then." "Perhaps," I suggested, "the fall of that large portion of the table-rock has made the alteration you describe." "You have just hit it," he said; "I forgot the circumstance. The Horse-shoe is not so perfect as it was." "Could these Falls ever have receded from Queenstone?" said I.