It
was bathed in snowy vapor to its crest, but now and then heavy currents
of air drew this aside, and they saw the outline of the Falls almost as
far as the Canada side. They remembered afterwards how they were able to
make use of but one sense at a time, and how when they strove to take in
the forms of the descending flood, they ceased to hear it; but as soon as
they released their eyes from this service, every fibre in them vibrated
to the sound, and the spectacle dissolved away in it. They were aware,
too, of a strange capriciousness in their senses, and of a tendency of
each to palter with the things perceived. The eye could no longer take
truthful note of quality, and now beheld the tumbling deluge as a Gothic
wall of careen marble, white, motionless, and now as a fall of lightest
snow, with movement in all its atoms, and scarce so much cohesion as
would hold them together; and again they could not discern if this course
were from above or from beneath, whether the water rose from the abyss or
dropped from the height. The ear could give the brain no assurance of the
sound that felled it, and whether it were great or little; the prevailing
softness of the cataract's tone seemed so much opposed to ideas of
prodigious force or of prodigious volume.
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