American Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, and Horseshoe Falls from Prospect Point
The waters of Niagara,
‘Tis wondrous how they go,
A tumbling from the rock above,
Down to the rocks below.
They’ve run this way, this many a day,
And now to shift the scene,
I would suggest, just for a change,
To have them run up stream.
Source: Dr. Thomas Rolph. A Brief Account, Together With Observations, Made During a Visit in the West Indies, and a Tour Through the United States of America, in Parts of the Years 1832-3; Together With a Statistical Account of Upper Canada. Dundas, U.C. : G. Heyworth Hackstaff, Printer, 1836.
Rolph mentions this poem was written in the Table Rock Album; it is not published in Thomas & Lathrop’s excerpts from the Table Rock Album. Rolph would have been looking at the original. See the Table of Contents of the Table Rock Albums
Who does not know that dreadful gulf, where Niagara falls,
Where eagle unto eagle screams, to vulture vulture calls;
Where down beneath, Despair and Death in liquid darkness grope,
And upward, on the foam there shines a rainbow without Hope;
While, hung with clouds of Fear and Doubt, the unreturning wave
Suddenly gives an awful plunge, like life into the grave;
And many a hapless mortal there hath dived to bale or bliss;
One—only one—hath ever lived to rise from that abyss!
Oh, Heav’n! it turns me now to ice, with chill of fear extreme,
To think of my frail bark adrift on that tumultuous stream!
In vain with desperate sinews, strung by love of life and light,
I urged that coffin, my canoe, against the current’s might:
On—on—still on—direct for doom, the river rush’d in force,
And fearfully the stream of Time raced with it in its course.
My eyes I closed—I dared not look the way towards the goal;
But still I view’d the horrid close, and dreamt it in my soul.
Plainly, as through transparent lids, I saw the fleeting shore,
And lofty trees, like winged things, flit by for evermore;
Plainly,—but with no prophet sense—I heard the sullen sound,
The torrent’s voice—and felt the mist, like death-sweat gathering round.
O agony! O life! My home! and those that made it sweet:
Ere I could pray, the torrent lay beneath my very feet.
With frightful whirl, more swift than thought, I passed the dizzy edge,
Bound after bound, with hideous bruise, I dashed from ledge to ledge,
From crag to crag,—in speechless pain,—from midnight deep to deep;
I did not die,—but anguish stunn’d my senses into sleep.
How long entranced, or whither dived, no clue I have to find:
At last the gradual light of life came dawning o’er my mind;
And through my brain there thrill’d a cry,—a cry as shrill as birds’
Of vulture or of eagle kind, but this was set to words:—
‘It’s Edgar Huntley in his cap and nightgown, I declares!
He’s been a walking in his sleep, and pitch’d all down the stairs!’
Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker is a 1799 novel by the American author Charles Brockden Brown that was popular at the time this poem was written.
Source: Thomas Hood. The Works of Thomas Hood: Comic, in Prose and Verse, with all the Original Illustrations. vol. 1. London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1882
