Page:Portraits of Places (London, Macmillan and Co., 1883).djvu/374

edge of the white abyss. The leap of the water begins directly at your feet, and your eye trifles dizzily with the long, perpendicular shaft of foam, and tries, in the eternal crash, to effect some vague notation of its successive stages of sound and fury; but the vaporous sheet, for ever dropping, lapses from beneath the eye, and leaves the vision distracted in mid-space; and the vision, in search of a resting-place, sinks in a flurry to the infamous saw-mill which defaces the very base of the torrent. The falls of Montmorency are obviously one of the greatest of the beauties of nature; but I hope it is not beside the mark to say that of all the beauties of nature, "falls" are to me the least satisfying. A mountain, a precipice, a river, a forest, a plain, I can enjoy at my ease; they are natural, normal, self- assured; they make no appeal; they imply no human admiration, no petty human cranings and shrinkings, head -swimmings and similes. A cataract, of course, is essentially violent. You are certain, moreover, to have to approach it through a turnstile, and to enjoy it from some terribly cockneyfied little booth. The spectacle at Montmorency appears to be the private property of a negro innkeeper, who "runs" it evidently with great pecuniary profit. A day or two since I went so far as to be glad to leave it behind, and drive some five miles farther along the road, to a village rejoicing in the pretty name of Château-Richer. The village is so pretty that you count on finding there the elderly manor which might have baptized it. But, of course, in such pictorial efforts as this Quebec breaks down; one must not ask too much