into a leap, and the leap into a resistless plunge, and all the bends, curves, leaps, and plunges fling themselves together in joyful abandonment, thrilled through and through with sensitive tremors of graceful daring.
As the cataract comes gushing forward rather than dropped in precipitous downfall, so it is not received on a flattened level of water below. Rocks break its plunge, and give it pause. And then this shape of beauty, disarrayed, but fairer thus, springs, not frantic or sullen, into a gloomy chasm, but sweeps, a mist of sunshine, down behind an iridescent veil, upon the white splendors of its own image. It eddies with lambent lights along the warm cliffs, and then glides down the steps and rapids of a new career — on to join the Amazon.
Serene sunshine fills the right of the gulf. On the left, where spray keeps the mosses of the cliff long and rich, is a flow of softened prismatic color, and the angle is filled with opalescent reflected lights from the sunny cataract. This is one of the most enchanting effects in the picture.
The gleam of the Cataract recalls the snows of the Dome. The bending plunge of the one repeats the slow curves of the other. Across leagues of full distance, the light of the fall, secluded and subordinate, answers, like an echo, to the great dominant light. And observe also in the division of the cataract by its bold cliff, and in its parted cascade falling in dimness on the right, a reminiscence
