The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3, June, 1851 — John Shaqi
The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3, June, 1851Various
History
The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3, June, 1851
Various
Art, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals
"We have had the full of the moon and a cloudless sky for
the last two or three nights, and of course we have walked
the ravine till the 'small hours,' seeing with wonder the
transforming effects of moonlight and its black shadows on
the falls and precipices. I have no idea (you will be glad
to know) of trying to reproduce these sublimities on
paper--at least not with my travelling stock of verbs and
adjectives. To 'sandwich the moon in a muffin,' one must
have time and a ladder of dictionaries. But one or two
effects struck me which perhaps are worth briefly naming,
and I will throw into the lot a poetical figure, which you
may use in your next song....
"The fourth Fall, (or the one that is flanked by the ruins
of a saw-mill) is, perhaps, a hundred feet across; and its
curve over the upper rock and its break upon the lower one,
form two parallel lines, the water everywhere falling the
same distance with the evenness of an artificial cascade.
The stream not being very full, just now, it came over, in
twenty or thirty places, thicker than elsewhere; and the
effect, from a distance, as the moonlight lay full upon it,
was that of twenty or thirty immovable marble columns
connected by transparent curtains of falling lace, and with
bases in imitation of foam. Now it struck me that this might
suggest a new and fanciful order of architecture, suitable
at least to the structure of green-houses, the glass roofs
of which are curved over and slope to the ground with very
much the contour of a waterfall....
"Subterranean as this foaming river looks by day, it looks
like a river in cloud-land by night. The side of the ravine
which is in shadow, is one undistinguishable mass of black,
with its wavy upper edge in strong relief against the sky,
and, as the foaming stream catches the light from the
opposite and moonlit side, it is outlined distinctly on its
bed of darkness, and seems winding its way between hills of
clouds, half black, half luminous. Below, where all is deep
shadow except the river, you might fancy it a silver mine
laid open to your view amid subterranean darkness by the
wand of an enchanter, or (if you prefer a military trope, my
dear General), a long white plume laid lengthwise between
the ridges of a cocked hat."
[Illustration]
NEW PROOF OF THE EARTH'S ROTATION.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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