Читать книгу The Niagara River - Archer Butler Hulbert - Страница 19

All this is most impressively true of the central wonder of the entire spectacle, the Falls themselves. That mighty flood of water, reborn as it dies, forms a marvellous spectacle. Writes Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer:

Very soon we realise that Niagara's true effect is an effect of permanence. Many as are its variations, it never alters. It varies because light and atmosphere alter. Tremendous movement thus pauseless and unmodified gives, of course, a deeper impression of durability than the most imposing solids. . . . As soon as this fact is felt, the Falls seem to have been created as a voucher for the permanence of all the world.[9]

But how conform this repose and spirit of permanency with the echoing tones of that never-ending, never-satisfied dominant chord? How reconcile the repose of those dropping billows with the tantalising unrest of that for ever incomplete, unfinished recessional that has been playing down this gorge since, perhaps, darkness brooded over the deep—that seems to await its fulfilment in the thunders of Sinai at that Last Day?

And what could be more human than this in any river—a seeming calm with over it all a never-ending cry of unrest, of wonder, of unsatisfied longing never to find repose until in that far resting-place of which Augustine thought when he wrote: