A crowd flowed onto the Suspension Bridge. Another onto Prospect Point. A third onto the Three Sisters Islands —all along the railings in the gorge. Across the river, a thousand more poured down to Table Rock. And up the shore, a hundred others— men, women and children— stood by the dock at Truesdale’s cottage, waiting to see me off. There were no clouds that morning, and so much light it seemed ten suns were whirling as I stepped into the skiff—in a tossing sea of handkerchiefs— and waved to them (while Russell blew a kiss) amidst the general hurrah.
Then we set out—with Truesdale straining the tiller against the single, headstrong sail— and Billy Holleran, a strong, strapping boy, manning the furious oars. The barrel rode upright behind us, bucking to run its course —and was jerked back to correction by the stern instruction of our rope. A quarter way out, we stopped on an island where I changed my clothes: no hat or dress now, but a blouse left open at the throat, and a skirt hemmed just below the knee. I made them turn away while I backed in through the rim— then they fastened down the lid, rolled me to the shore, turned me upright— pushed me in.
Four boats now. And behind the first, the towed barrel, weighed down with me— yet still intractable. And in the last, a cameraman recording every stroke as they rowed a mile across to the Point of No Return— where the river starts to churn, and a sailor knows he’d better bend his back —or else go over. There they knocked. And cut the rope. They must have pulled hard then to turn themselves south, but I went north—(a half mile more before I’d reach the brink). I careened and spun. Once it tossed me clear up out of the water. I went unbidden—and unwelcome—where it rushed me.
I wished I could have watched from some place overhead and heard the voices racing down the shore— passing on the message— dock to island, island to rock, rock to bridge: “She’s coming!” I would have liked to see them turn their heads— wave after wave, as each new group heard the murmur and craned their necks to catch a glimpse. I’d have liked to see the trolley racing down the shore, and the incline railway rushing down the gorge —so the ones who’d waved from Truesdale’s dock could be standing on the rocks below the Falls, looking up—to see if anything would come.
from Queen of the Mist, a novel in verse about the first person to go over Niagara in a barrel
In nature, all acts that have gone before
Leave traces, record marks, clues, tracks in store
That many persons pause to ponder o’er.
From inside outwards was the earth’s crust made,
The hollows caved in, the high mountains stayed,
Encircling flames produced the waters vast,
And time and seasons scaled things to the last.
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡II
Would thirty thousand years of effort score
On your astonishment a mark, or more?
Then hearken to a tale of work replete
With action in rain, sunshine, frost and sleet.
The speaker is NIAG’RA RIVER, old,
Clear, turbulent, odd, scenic giver, bold.
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡III
With strength unshorn by time, and white of brow,
But not from years, I am the center now
For myriads that travel from far and
Near to view my Falls as the cascade grand.
My life is in the cycle of the rain,
My strength from waters the Great Lakes retain.
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡IV
The first to view the drainage plan, of three
Such large lakes flowing into Erie free,
Thence through me to a fifth and on to sea,
Said, “This is quite rare and not apt to be.”
Important link am I, from fourth to last,
The present scanned, the future viewed, or past.
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡V
The deep flow of my misting Horseshoe Falls,
Out does thin water leaping from side walls.
The view and sound effects are rapturous,
The roar, thump grind and spray continuous.
At what they sense, the millions gaze appalled,
Awondering, breath indrawn, stilled, enthralled. Continue reading “The River Niagara by Donald Lashelle”→
Formed when the oceans were fashioned, when all the world ‡‡was a workshop;
Loud roared the furnace fires, and tall leapt the smoke ‡‡from volcanoes,
Scooped were round bowls for lakes, and grooves for the ‡‡sliding of rivers,
Whilst, with a cunning hand, the mountains were linked ‡‡together.
Then through the day-dawn, lurid with cloud, and rent ‡‡by forked lightning,
Striken by earthquake beneath, above by the rattle of ‡‡thunder,
Sudden the clamour was pierced by a voice, deep-lunged ‡‡and portentous —
Thine, O Niagara, crying: “Now is created completed!”
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡II.
Millions of cup-like blossoms, brimming with dew and with ‡‡rain-drops,
Mingle their tributes together to form one slow-trickling ‡‡brooklet;
Thousands of brooklets and rills, leaping down from their ‡‡home in the uplands,
Grow to a smooth, blue river, serene and flowing in ‡‡silence.
Hundreds of smooth, blue rivers, flashing afar o’er the ‡‡prairies,
Darkening ‘neath forests of pine, deep drowning the reeds ‡‡in the marshes,
Cleaving with noiseless sledge the rocks red-crusted with ‡‡copper,
Circle at last to one common goal, the Mighty Sea-Water.
Lo! to the northward outlying, wide glimmers the stretch ‡‡of the Great Lake,
White-capped and sprinkled with foam, that tumbles its ‡‡bellowing breakers
Landward on beaches of sand, and in hiding-holes hollow ‡‡with thunder,
Landward where plovers frequent, with the wolf and the ‡‡westering bison. Continue reading “Niagara by George Houghton”→
James Alexander Tucker was born in Owen Sound, Ontario, on the 22nd day of December, 1872. He was descended of that sturdy pioneer stock through which, as may so often be seen in this Dominion of ours, a passionate love for outward freedom and largeness of material life is transfused into an equally passionate love of liberty for those less tangible things of the mind and spirit.
The bending of the twig, in even his earliest youth, showed clearly enough just how the ultimate tree of destiny was to be inclined. At the age of three, before he had so much as mastered the alphabet, he might be called a scribe, for once a week he issued to his family circle a newspaper made up of lines and dots and atavistic little drawings. This in time gave place to a carefully printed weekly, a compact sheet some five inches square, into which crept not infrequent echoes of the tears and laughter, the tiny comedies and the calamities, making up all childhood. This odd little sheet was tenaciously circulated among friends and relatives for years ; and during his subsequent school-days he was responsible for a number of more ambitious journalistic ventures, culminating, after his entrance into the Owen Sound Collegiate Institute, in the establishment of “ The Auditorium ” which, it is perhaps worthy of note, still remains the organ of the students’ literary society in that institution.
Often in those lives predestined to be brief is crowded a compensating capability for continuous and feverish action. The life of James Alexander Tucker, like that of other poets who in the very April of their days bade farewell to the world, is still another instance of the operation of this tendency. He was a worker always, a joyous, indefatigable worker. With all the time and thought and care lavished on his adolescent journalism, he still succeeded in taking a high stand in his school work. When he was matriculated, with honors, from the Owen Sound Collegiate Institute, and became an undergraduate of the University of Toronto, the sphere of his literary activities widened, and an opportunity for sustained and more serious effort presented itself ; but never did he allow the stress of his purely creative work, which was both a delight and a necessity to him, to interfere with his academic obligations.
Although, as a youth, he was touched with that reticence and shyness which is both the evidence and the outcome of the more imaginative and sensitive nature, he had never allowed any shadow of this temperamental timidity to darken his ardent and resolute spirit. He was, indeed, the possessor of that higher and better courage which is born of the union of a delicate and painstaking scrupulosity with a keenly aggressive and almost inflexible will. He was ever more of the Hamlet than the Laertes, gentle, lovable, loyal to the uttermost, with at times a touch of intellectual melancholy about him ; yet even to the end, when entering the very shadow of the Valley, a valiant and outspoken lover of life. To those of his friends who wandered from the straight and narrow path of faith he seemed surprisingly orthodox. For with all his vigor and inquisitiveness of mind, his natural bent was strongly conservative. His entire career, to me, always seemed strangely parallel with that of Arthur Hugh Clough — with the marked difference that where one went on questioning to the end, the other sought consolation in revealed faith and found strength in the religion of his fathers.
It was this seriousness of mind and strength of conviction, even above that indefinite and all-but-in- describable atmosphere of sweetness and light dwelling about the rapt young poet, which attracted to James Alexander Tucker the more serious minds of his university class.
Within the halls of every college, I take it, however materialistic or bacchanalian its outward tendency, there practically always exists a select coterie of finer undergraduate spirits, looking out on life more earnestly and more questioningly, more wistfully and more passionately seeking that inner and older truth which is not to be found in the class-books, draining from pure and congenial fellowship that rarer wine so often denied the noisier apostles of what I might call modern collegiate epicureanism.
It was our young poet’s privilege to be the centre of such a coterie at the University of Toronto. Although neither avid of applause nor audacious of action, he was at once recognized as a leader of student life and thought, and readily and spontaneously those different honors at the disposal of his classmates were thrust upon him. His most significant and noteworthy election was that to the editorship of ’ Varsity , the long- established and jealously maintained weekly paper of the student body. It was while filling this position with such brilliant success that the young poet, with his passionate love of freedom, with his hatred of oppression, and his uncompromising ideality, came into collision with constituted authority.
It is a decade now since James Alexander Tucker fought his courageously determined fight for liberty of undergraduate speech and activity. It would be needless and out of place here to enlarge on his sustained and self-sacrificing opposition to authority tyrannically exercised. Momentous as the episode seemed to the student-body, which joined in open and unanimous revolt against those powers which oppressed them, the movement which Mr. Tucker headed is here worthy of consideration more as an evidence of one unselfish man’s heroic and disinterested devotion to Abstract Right, and as a token of that scrupulous allegiance to a just cause, however hopeless and forlorn, which marks the strong mind as the leader of the weak. It is, at best, a sad and painful chapter in the history of those halls which so many of us love, or have loved. It is a sad and painful chapter, — and yet it is far from being a record of defeat. For out of the ashes of such failures rises the more triumphant and the more enduring victory.
“ Two only in God’s universe —
Two wretched beings, hateful base ! —
The Stars have power to grind and curse,
The Years have warrant to disgrace : —
He who in hate shouts ‘Crucify !’
And he who, knowing well the Right,
Stands by, nor draws his sword to fight,
Because his vile heart fears to die.”
It is true that the young poet left the walls that should have been proud to shield him, preferring expulsion to the sacrifice of a righteous conviction. But his going was of such a character that his migration to Leland Stanford University partook, indeed, of the nature of a justly won triumph, — not of the ignominy of a spiritual defeat. Even the college from which he went, as was the case after the expulsion of Shelley from Oxford, in time learned to regret, tacitly if not openly, the measures which the obduracy of offended dignity had prompted.
After Mr. Tucker’s death, indeed, a number of his most vigorous professorial opponents wrote poignantly significant letters, expressing their personal admiration for the purity and strength of his character and the undeviating lofty disinterestedness of his conduct
After being graduated from Leland Stanford University, James Alexander Tucker, who all through his busy collegiate career had supported himself with his pen, naturally enough turned to the profession of letters for a livelihood. Since he chose to remain in the land of his birth, scorning the wider scope and the noisier and readier recognition of the alien market, he at once identified himself with Canadian journalism. Here again, as during his earlier college course, his clearness of thought and firmness of conviction enabled him to leave a marked influence on even the the busy currents of public opinion. His scholarly and studious editorials were copiously quoted and copied ; the different periodicals with which he was associated took on a personality and vigor all their own. Indeed, so successful and so engrossing did this journalistic work become that it remains a matter of regret that the leisured poet for a time stood in danger of being lost in the busy writer of the day. Already, in the spring of the year 1899, he had married Etta B. Graham, of Owen Sound, the friend and playmate of his ardent boyhood days. It was a happy and enriching union, marked by the birth of one child, a daughter. But with its joys and solaces the newer order of things brought with it its newer preoccupations and responsibilities. His note of song became all too rare. Pure and lofty as was his verse in quality, grim circumstance sternly limited its quantity. The exactions of the newspaper office ordained that lyric-writing should become an avocation of leisure, and not a vocation of self-absorbing idleness.
Yet into this verse has flowered the essential spirit of the young poet as he was and as he lived — only, as Merck once said of Goethe, James Alexander Tucker always stood and always will remain greater than anything he wrote. He made life itself fully and deeply harmonious. He attuned existence to that timeless music which falls from the lips of Faith and Hope and Love.
Indescribably moving and tragic as were the circumstances of that last long illness to which in the end he was forced to bow — an illness, too, of such a nature that as the cruse of the body became frailer the flame of the mind grew stronger — there was no sign, from first to last, of muffled self-pity or attitudinizing. He accepted his fate silently and valiantly, even on the day of his death finding much pleasure and consolation in a volume of Matthew Arnold’s poetry, doubtless thinking of that Thyrsis for whom other minds had mourned. Yet with all this tenacious alertness of mind he had neither the vanity nor the inclination of the trained hand (to be seen even in a Robert Louis Stevenson) to toy with the dark folds of his adversity. Both his grief and his resignation seemed tighter-lipped than that of Stevenson. It was a stoic and studious calm, too deep for words and artistry.
And this the chosen few who knew and loved him wistfully remembered, and at least partly understood, when, on the twenty-second day of December, precisely thirty-two years after the date of his birth, all that was mortal returned to the dust whence it came, and those scattered songs which were but echoes from the fuller symphony of his perfect life, were left to the careless ears of a seemingly uncomprehending world. And yet he is not dead ; nor will he altogether die. For, as once sang that master-spirit whom he so loved —
“ He has outsoared the shadow of our night ;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again
Peace, peace ! he is not dead, he doth not sleep —
He hath awakened from the dream of life.”
Biographical notes on James Alexander Tucker by Arthur Stringer, published in Tucker’s Poems. Toronto: Briggs, 1904.
Reinterment Services Held at Drummond Hill Cemetery, October 17, 1891. Photo courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library
(Suggested by the burial, October 17th, 1891, of the remains of
some of the British forces who fought in this memorable battle.)
Three-quarters of a century
Have passed away like snow,
Since Drummond and Riall stood firm
And fought the furious foe;
When round our gallant fellows
The bullets hissed like rain,
And heaped with dead and dying men
The field of Lundy‘s Lane.
The twilight of the summer eve
Was hovering in the sky,
When rose upon the listening air
The British battle-cry;
Then through the trembling heavens surged
The roar of giant strife,
For thrice two thousand armed men
Were battling there for life.
Yet still above that fearful din
Of battle‘s mad career
Was heard from throbbing British throats
The British battle cheer.
All through that night till midnight‘s hour
Was on Time‘s trembling lip,
Our gallant fellows at the cup
Of bitter death did sip.
They cared not if each moment drained
The drops of faltering life,
They fought for home and native land,
For mother, child and wife.
Not theirs the fight for conquest,
Not theirs the fight for gold,
But theirs the fight for freedom‘s right
Their fathers gained of old.
Thus with stern hearts and steady hands
They marched into the fray,
And there our bloodiest battle
Was fought and won that day.
Bloodiest! aye, six thousand men
At dusk stood on the field:
Two thousand dead or dying fell
Before the day was sealed.
Yes, o‘er their grave let banners wave,
Let trumpets moan their funeral note;
God in His might looked down that night —
Looked, and the wrong he smote.
They fought for home and native land,
For mother, child and wife,
And recked not if each moment drained
The dregs of faltering life.
They fought for home and native land,
They held the foe at bay;
They fell, but though they fell, they stand
In honor‘s ranks today.
They gave their blood to save the flag,
To keep the land from shame;
To God be praise for victory,
To them eternal fame!
And though we hope that ne‘er again
Such strife may shake our land,
But pray these sister nations may
Give each a friendly hand;
Yet while one drop of British blood
Swells a Canadian vein,
Our hearts must thrill when we recall
The fight of Lundy‘s Lane.
Source: Kevin McCabe, ed. The Poetry of Old Niagara. St. Catharines, Ont.: Blarney Stone Books, 1999.
Originally published: James Alexander Tucker. Poems. Toronto: Briggs, 1904.
