Free Niagara: A History of the Falls by Pierre Berton

amount of waterpower available – but they would be prepared to go twice as far to contemplate the masonry of the Erie Canal at Lockport.
    Finally, a young man in cotton homespun turned up, carrying a staff in his hand and a pack on his shoulders. He stood at the very lip of Table Rock, fixing his eyes on the Horseshoe Falls until “his whole soul seemed to go forth and be transported thither,” at which point the staff dropped from his fingers and tumbled over the brink.
    Hawthorne lingered until he was alone. Then, as the sun set, he took the winding road down to the ferry landing on the Canadian side to watch as “the golden sunshine tinged the sheet of the American cascade and painted on its heaving spray the broken semicircle of a rainbow.” His steps were slow. He lingered at every turn, knowing these glimpses would be his last. “The solitude of the old wilderness now reigned over the whole vicinity of the falls. My enjoyment became the more rapturous, because no poet shared it – nor wretch, devoid of poetry, profaned it: but the spot, so famous throughout the world, was all my own!”
    The novelist was not alone in his initial experience of the Falls. Two years later, Anna Jameson, the British art critic, feminist, and travel writer, preparing her book Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada , reproached herself because, like Hawthorne’s, her first experience had been a letdown. The cataract had thundered in her imagination as long as she could remember. Now she wished she had never seen it, that it had remained “a thing unbeheld – a thing imagined, hoped, and anticipated, – something to live for.” The reality of that first sight had displaced from her mind “an illusion far more magnificent than itself – I have no words for my utter disappointment.”
    She, too, blamed herself for failing to respond to Niagara. Surely those early reports she had read – of astonishment, enthusiasm, and rapture – could not be passed off as mere hyperbole! And yet the cataracts of Switzerland had affected her a thousand times more than the immensity of Niagara.
    “O I could beat myself!” she wrote. The first impression of a new experience – that sudden sensation of awe, surprise, and delight – was lost and could never be recaptured. “Though I should live a thousand years, long as Niagara itself shall roll, I can never see it again for the first time. Something is gone that cannot be restored.”
    On and on she went, in an orgy of verbal flagellation, castigating herself for her obtuseness. “What has come over my soul and senses? -I am no longer Anna – I am metamorphosed – I am translated – I am an ass’s head, a clod, a wooden spoon, a fat weed growing on Lethe’s bank, a stock, a stone, a petrification – for have I not seen Niagara, the wonder of wonders; and felt – no words can tell what disappointment!”
    She had come up from Queenston that day – January 29, 1836 – when suddenly her companion checked the horses and exclaimed, “The Falls!” Everything she had read had created an image of the cataract – soul-subduing beauty, appalling terror, power, height, velocity, immensity. But now, as she gazed down upon that distant scene – the Falls half-frozen in a white shroud – she fell quite silent, “my very soul sunk within me.” It was not at all what she had expected.
    She put up at the Clifton House on the Canadian side, now desolate in winter, its summer verandahs and open balconies hung with icicles and encumbered with snow, its public rooms shabby and chill, its windows broken, its dinner tables dusty. From there she donned crampons, proceeded to Table Rock, and suddenly “could not tear myself away.” Like Hawthorne, she sat on the edge until “a kind of dreamy fascination came over me,” and watched the sun create an iris across the American Falls. She too had been brought up on the travellers’ accounts of terror, awe, and grandeur, and the reality had failed