Poem by A. S. Ridgely

“Man lays his scepter on the ocean waste,
His footprints stiffen in the Alpine snows,
But only God moves visibly in Thee,
O King of Floods! that with resistless fate
Down plungest in thy mighty width and depth.
*    *    *   *   *  Amazement, terror, fill,
Impress and overcome the gazer’s soul.

 

Man’s schemes and dreams and petty littleness

Lie open and revealed.     Himself far less—

Kneeling before thy great confessional—

Than are the bubbles of the passing tides.

Words may not picture thee, nor pencil paint

Thy might of waters, volumed vast and deep;

Thy many-toned and all-pervading voice;

 

Thy wood-crown’d Isle, fast anchor’d on the brink

Of the dread precipice; thy double stream,

Divided, yet in beauty unimpaired;

Thy wat’ry caverns and thy crystal walls;

Thy crest of sunlight and thy depths of shade,

Boiling and seething like a Phlegethon

Amid the wind-swept and convolving spray,

Steady as Faith and beautiful as Hope.

There, of beam and cloud the fair creation,

 

The rainbow arches its ethereal hues.

From flint and granite in compacture strong;

Not with steel thrice harden’d—but with the wave

Soft and translucent—did the new-born Time

Chisel thy altars.     Here hast thou ever poured

Earth’s grand libation to Eternity,

Thy misty incense rising unto God—

The God that was and is and is to be.”

---

Also published in Holley, George W., ed.  The Falls of Niagara.  Baltimore: A.C. Armstrong & Son, 1883  (N.B. Holley mentions this poem by Ridgely is an excerpt from a larger work.)

 

Also published in Dow, Charles Mason. Anthology and Bibliography of Niagara Falls. Albany: State of New York, 1921.