Part 15 (2/2)

Resembling, 'mid the tortures of the scene, Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.

Byron did not write of Niagara, but these stanzas beginning

The roar of waters ...

often have been applied to our cataract. Mr. Gray may or may not have been familiar with them. In any event he improved on the earlier poet's figure.

Merely as a matter of chronicle, it is well to record here the names of several writers, some of them of considerable reputation, who have contributed to the poetry of Niagara. Alfred B. Street's well-known narrative poem, ”Frontenac,” contains Niagara pa.s.sages. So does Levi Bishop's metrical volume ”Teuchsa Grondie” (”Whip-poor-will”), the Niagara portion dedicated to the Hon. Augustus S. Porter. Ever since Chateaubriand wrote ”Atala,” authors have been prompted to a.s.sociate Indian legends with Niagara, but none has done this more happily than William Trumbull, whose poem, ”The Legend of the White Canoe,”

ill.u.s.trated by F. V. Du Mond, is one of the most artistic works in all the literature of Niagara.

The Rev. William Ellery Channing, the Rev. Joseph H. Clinch, the Rev.

Joseph Cook, Christopher P. Cranch, Oliver I. Taylor, Grenville Mellen, Prof. Moffat, John Savage, Augustus N. Lowry, Claude James Baxley of Virginia, Abraham Coles, M. D., Henry Howard Brownell, the Rev. Roswell Park, Willis g.a.y.l.o.r.d Clark, Mary J. Wines, M. E. Wood, E. H. Dewart, G.

W. Cutter, J. N. McJilton, and the Chicago writer, Harriet Monroe, are, most of them, minor poets (some, perhaps, but poets by courtesy), whose tributes to our cataract are contained in their collected volumes of verse. In E. G. Holland's ”Niagara and Other Poems” (1861), is a poem on Niagara thirty-one pages long, with several pages of notes, ”composed for the most part by the Drachenfels, one of the Seven Mountains of the Rhine, in the vicinity of Bonn, September, 1856, and delivered as a part of an address on American Scenery the day following.” Among the Canadian poets who have attempted the theme, besides several already named, may be recorded John Breakenridge, a volume of whose verse was printed at Kingston in 1846; Charles Sangster, James Breckenridge, John Imrie, and William Rice, the last three of Toronto. The French-Canadian poet, Louis Frechette, has written an excellent poem, ”Le Niagara.” Wm. Sharpe, M.

D., ”of Ireland,” wrote at length in verse on ”Niagara and Nature Wors.h.i.+p.” Charles Pelham Mulvaney touches the region in his poem, ”South Africa Remembered at Niagara.” One of the most striking effusions on the subject comes from the successful Australian writer, Douglas Sladen. It is ent.i.tled ”To the American Fall at Niagara,” and is dated ”Niagara, Oct. 18, 1899”:

Niagara, national emblem! Cataract Born of the maddened rapids, sweeping down Direct, resistless from the abyss's crown Into the deep, fierce pool with vast impact Scarce broken by the giant boulders, stacked To meet thine onslaught, threatening to drown Each tillaged plain, each level-loving town 'Twixt thee and ocean. Lo! the type exact!

America Niagarized the world.

Europe, a hundred years agone, beheld An avalanche, like pent-up Erie, hurled Through barriers, to which the rocks of eld Seemed toy things--leaping into G.o.dlike s.p.a.ce A sign and wonder to the human race.[87]

Friedrich Bodenstedt and Wilhelm Meister of Germany, J. B. Scandella and the Rev. Santo Santelli of Italy (”Cascada di Niagara,” 1841), have place among our Niagara poets. So, conspicuously, has Juan Antonio Perez Bonalde, whose ill.u.s.trated volume, ”El Poema del Niagara,”

dedicated to Emilio Castelar, with a prose introduction of twenty-five pages by the Cuban martyr Jose Marti, was published in New York, reaching at least a second edition, in 1883. Several Mexican poets have addressed themselves to Niagara. ”a la Catarata del Niagara” is a sonnet by Don Manuel Carpio, whose collected works have been issued at Vera Cruz, Paris, and perhaps elsewhere. In the dramatic works of Don Vincente Riva Palacio and Don Juan A. Mateos is found ”La Catarata del Niagara,” a three-act drama in verse; the first two acts occur in Mexico, in the house of _Dona Rosa_, the third act is at Niagara Falls, the time being 1847.[88] The Spanish poet Antonio Vinageras, nearly fifty years ago, wrote a long ode on Niagara, dedicating it to ”la celebre poetisa, Dona Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda.” In no language is there a n.o.bler poem on Niagara than the familiar work by Maria Jose Heredosia, translated from the Spanish by William Cullen Bryant. The Comte de Fleury, who visited Niagara a few years ago, left a somewhat poetical souvenir in French verse. Fredrika Bremer, whose prose is often unmetered poetry even after translation, wrote of Niagara in a brief poem. The following is a close paraphrase of the Swedish original:

Niagara is the betrothal of Earth's life With the Heavenly life.

That has Niagara told me to-day.

And now can I leave Niagara. She has Told me her word of primeval being.

Another Scandinavian poet, John Nyborn, has written a meritorious poem on Niagara Falls, an adaptation of which, in English, was published some years since by Dr. Albin Bernays.

It is a striking fact that Niagara's stimulus to the poetic mind has been quite as often through the ear as through the eye. The best pa.s.sages of the best poems are prompted by the sound of the falling waters, rather than by the expanse of the flood, the height of cliffs, or the play of light. In Mr. Bulkley's work, which indeed exhausts the whole store of simile and comparison, we perpetually hear the voice of the falls, the myriad voices of nature, the awful voice of G.o.d.

”Minstrel of the Floods,”

he cries:

What paeans full of triumph dost thou hymn!

However varied is the rhythm sweet Of thine unceasing song! The ripple oft Astray along thy banks a lyric is Of love; the cool drops trickling down thy sides Are gentle sonnets; and thy lesser falls Are strains elegiac, that sadly sound A monody of grief; thy whirlpool fierce, A shrill-toned battle-song; thy river's rush A strain heroic with its couplet rhymes; . . . . . . . . .

While the full sweep of thy close-crowded tide Resounds supreme o'er all, an epic grand.

Of this cla.s.s, too, is the ”Apostrophe to Niagara,” by one B. Frank Palmer, in 1855. It is said to have been ”written with the pencil in a few minutes, the author seated on the bank, drenched, from the mighty bath at Termination Rock, and still listening to the roar and feeling the eternal jar of the cataract.” The Rev. T. Starr King, upon reading it in 1855, said: ”The apostrophe has the music of Niagara in it.” As a typical example of the devotional apostrophe it is perhaps well to give it in full:

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