On the whole I do not account
this sort of familiarity a misfortune. The surprise is none the less a
surprise because it is kept till the last, and the marvel, making itself
finally felt in every nerve, and not at once through a single sense, all
the more fully possesses you. It is as if Niagara reserved her
magnificence, and preferred to win your heart with her beauty; and so
Isabel, who was instinctively prepared for the reverse, suffered a vague
disappointment, for a little instant, as she looked along the verge from
the water that caressed the shore at her feet before it flung itself
down, to the wooded point that divides the American from the Canadian
Fall, beyond which showed dimly through its veil of golden and silver
mists the emerald wall of the great Horse-Shoe. "How still it is!" she
said, amidst the roar that shook the ground under their feet and made the
leaves tremble overhead, and "How lonesome!" amidst the people lounging
and sauntering about in every direction among the trees. In fact that
prodigious presence does make a solitude and silence round every spirit
worthy to perceive it, and it gives a kind of dignity to all its
belongings, so that the rocks and pebbles in the water's edge, and the
weeds and grasses that nod above it, have a value far beyond that of such
common things elsewhere.
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