Falling

“ Men fall, tossing their arms; some leap into the air, some plunge headlong, falling like logs of wood or lumps of lead. Some reel, stagger, and tumble; others lie down gently as to a night’s repose, unheeding the din, commotion, and uproar. ”

“ There is a short retreat, a recognition of the danger and vigorous rally, another forced step backwards, an ineffectual whirring of wings on the extreme brink, and, turning in the moment of falling, the discomfited one renounces all further effort and plunges into the abyss. And, no doubt, the little lice who crawl about upon the ledge and see such mighty doings, would, were they poets, write long epics telling of the wars and falls of angels. ”

“ You are also out of the way of those rain-loosened boulders which have a way of detaching themselves in a storm, and coming violently from above, falling sometimes at your feet or dashing past your knees to fall another two thousand feet into the abyss below you. ”

“ Strange laughter, and the unhealing wound of death.
These in the world, all these, have come upon me,
Leaving me mute and shaken with surprise.
Oh, turn them in your measureless contemplation,
And in their mastery teach me to be wise.
67
The Falling Leaves
Lightly He blows, and at His breath they fall,
The perishing kindreds of the leaves; they drift,
Spent flames of scarlet, gold aerial,
Across the hollow year, noiseless and swift. ”

“ If I stumble as I run, the sensation of falling provokes a movement of the hands towards the direction of the fall, the effect of which is to shield the body from too sudden a shock. If a cinder enter my eye, its lids close forcibly and a copious flow of tears tends to wash it out. ”

“ Not the least of these sensations is created by the deep roar of the falling torrent, that shakes the solid rocks beneath your feet, and is repeated by the thousand hidden echoes among those stern craggy heights. ”

“ Who shall describe the sensation of the poor mortal, as he felt himself falling—falling down—down, a blind mass, through the darkened air? Those who have fallen, or have leaped even from a moderate height, can have no conception of the frenzied terror that took possession of him for a moment. ”

“ Don't you see that I am fighting the tempter, don't you see that I am half way down the hill and am trying to make a stand, that I am over the edge of the cliff, and am hanging to the bushes with bleeding, lacerated hands in the desperate endeavour to keep myself from falling? ”

“ The man falls from the roof. The cause of his falling is the misstep he makes; the cause of his falling is gravity; the cause of his falling is the greater distance of the roof than the surface of the earth to the center of the earth; the cause of his falling is the ascent to the roof; the cause of his falling is his coming to make repairs. ”

“ "It was night, and the rain fell; and, falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood. ”

“ In a general way his music is that of the streams refined and spiritualized. The deep booming notes of the falls are in it, the trills of rapids, the gurgling of margin eddies, the low whispering of level reaches, and the sweet tinkle of separate drops oozing from the ends of mosses and falling into tranquil pools. ”

“ With them, being tree-dwellers, the liability of falling was an ever-present menace. Many lost their lives that way; all of them experienced terrible falls, saving themselves by clutching branches as they fell toward the ground. ”

“ We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey,
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes. ”

“ The Sulphurous Hail Shot after us in storm, oreblown hath laid The fiery Surge, that from the Precipice Of Heav'n receiv'd us falling, and the Thunder, Wing'd with red Lightning and impetuous rage, Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep. ”

“ I suspect that when we have broken the shell of fear, falling may be delightful. Jumping down is, after all, only a steeper tobogganing, and tobogganing a milder jumping down. Always I used to funk at the top of the Cresta run. ”

“ It will be noted, in passing, that in this falling dream which is so familiar to you and me and all of us, we never strike bottom. To strike bottom would be destruction. Those of our arboreal ancestors who struck bottom died forthwith. True, the shock of their fall was communicated to the cerebral cells, but they died immediately, before they could have progeny. ”

“ Few gamblers but would stare if they were told that the falling of a die on a particular face is as much the effect of a definite cause as the fact of its falling; it is a proverb that "the wind bloweth where it listeth;" and even thoughtful men usually receive with surprise the suggestion, that the form of the crest of every wave that breaks, wind-driven, on the sea-shore, and the direction of every particle of foam that flies before the gale, are the exact effects of definite causes ”

“ Fell asunder; and horrible vacuum
Beneath him & on all sides round.
5: Falling, falling! Los fell & fell
Sunk precipitant heavy down down
Times on times, night on night, day on day
Truth has bounds. ”

“ Those at some distance from the falling man could afford to be romantic and piteous over his fate. Those in his dangerous neighborhood were too busy getting out of the way. "Man falling—stand from under!" ”

“ Thus falling, falling from afar,
As if some melancholy star
Had mingled with her light her sighs,
And dropped them from the skies. ”

“ Beating against cliffs and other obstructions, they will cause shocks and concussions, fissures, and a partial local falling of the internal vault, the effects of which will be felt at the surface as undulations and tremblings. ”

“ A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones; ”

“ Picture to your imagination a vast column of smoke, of inky blackness, reaching from the earth to heaven, gyrating with fearful velocity—bright lightnings issuing from the vortex—the roar of the thunder—the rushing of the blast—the crash of timber—the limbs of trees, leaves and rubbish, mingled with clouds of dust, whirling through the air;—you then have a faint idea of the scene. ”

“ The entire fall is above two hundred feet at one leap, over a dark rugged precipice, closed in on every side with sharp rocks, and suggesting to the mind ideas of much terror and sublimity. Attempts have been made to scale the face of the fall, occasionally with fatal results, and the imagination can create, even if the eyes cannot see, the fluttering of morsels of clothing that are pointed out by the guide as horrible memorials of such foolhardy attempts. ”

“ What would follow would, however, spell death. The impact of her body would set the shale in motion, like an avalanche—and beyond the eaves was only emptiness and the boulder-strewn bed of the chasm, a hundred feet below! ”

“ That this catastrophe was indeed THE FALL OF MAN.
Think what a fall!
From comfort to misery; from plowed fields to the
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thistles and the stones; from sunny and glorious days in a stormless land to the awful trials of the Drift Age; the rains, the cold, the snow, the ice, the incessant tempests, the darkness, the poverty, the coats of hides, the cave-life, the cannibalism, the Stone Age.
Here was a fall indeed.
There is nothing in antiquity that has not a meaning. The very fables of the world's childhood should be sacred from our laughter. ”

“ When one of the fissured masses falls there is first a heavy, plunging crash, then a deep, deliberate, long-drawn-out thundering roar, followed by clashing, grating sounds from the agitated bergs set in motion by the new arrival, and the swash of waves along the beach. ”

“ All my lost power of independent movement came back to me at once, and frantically clutching at the fog wreaths around me I began to fall. Most of us know that ugly old dream where the bed plays see-saw over some unfathomable abyss, higher at every swing, till suddenly we wake snatching at the bed-clothes and bathed in sweat. ”

“ As you listen, the thunder peals loudly, then dies away into a hoarse grumble, rolls on again as if swelled by minor storms, clangs in the ear, and after a while, like a river of sound welling over and irrepressible, drowns the sense in one vast rush of inexpressible grandeur—then melts away till you are almost startled at the silence and look up to see the Falls, like a green mountain-side streaked with fresh snowdrifts, slide and shimmer over the precipice. ”

“ I saw him crawl, I saw him fall, then run with rope in hand.
And then the darkness gulped him up, and down we dashed once more,
And nearer, nearer drew the jam, and thunder-like its roar.
Oh God! all’s lost... ”

“ The fall is the finest I have seen, from the volume of its foaming water, and the violence with which it leaps from crag to crag through the ravine it has hollowed till it makes its last bound of one hundred and twenty feet, and from the basin which receives it, the spray mounts like steam. ”

“ A fall meant death, and many a time their hearts stood still, as the intrepid lad placed his foot on a dead branch only to have it break under him, or reached for a limb to find it give way at his touch. ”

“ And broken mutterings, all declare
The fearful dream that haunts her now.
The storm-wind, rushing through the sky,
Wails from the depths of cloudy space;
Shrill, piercing as the seaman's cry
When death and he are face to face. ”

“ Deceiving; and men, horses, arms, fall in heaps, in confusion.
And see! Now the clouds, by an icy gale smitten, their burden
Discharge! Lo! the gusts of the whirlwind swirl fiercely about them;
The sky in convulsions, with swollen hail buffets them sorely. ”

“ Let the elm by the road feel a shock to the core,
Lean forward, and totter at the will of the storm!
Let the heights of the rock roll the avalanche down,
Let the torrents rave hoarse, and in night's murky frown
Let old Chaos appear in its primitive form! ”

“ I have known fearful ravages to follow in their path--seen many a goodly tree go down. After every storm, though the sky may be clearer, the earth upon which it fell has suffered some loss which is a loss for ever. ”

“ Passing the eye upward, and gazing upon the falls, they are now presented in all their stupendous grandeur. The waters roll over in huge bodies, never ceasing—rolling, rolling, rolling. You see it, and linger to see it. Echoes reverberate, and the constant murmur and rumble, like a hundred mill-races in a freshet, send a feeling which you cannot forget. No one has inclination to speak while viewing the falls. ”

“ As we climbed with the tips of our fingers in some small crevice, and the tips of our toes just resting on some painfully minute ledge, probably covered with ice or snow, one question gradually forced itself upon us, almost to the exclusion of the previously absorbing one, whether we should get to the top of the mountain, and this was, how on earth we should ever get down again—get down, that is to say, in any other state than that of débris. ”

“ With the shifting wind and the passing clouds the scene was in perpetual change; now the American Fall was creamy white, and the mist below dark, and again the heavy mass was gray and sullen, and the mist like silver spray. Perhaps nowhere else in the world is the force of nature so overpowering to the mind, and as the eye wanders from the chaos of the fall to the far horizon, where the vast rivers of rapids are poured out of the sky, one feels that this force is inexhaustible and eternal. ”

“ There fell nor lantern-flame nor lightning-gleam,
Nor gleam of moon or meteor; the wind
Withdrawn as in some sighing tomb, declined,
And all the dust was fallen; the waters drear
Lay still as blood of corpses. ”

“ Custom surely blunts us to every chance, every danger, that may happen to us hourly. Were the avalanche over you for a day,—I grant your state of torture,—but had an avalanche rested over you for years, and not yet fallen, you would forget that it could ever fall; you would eat, sleep, and make love, as if it were not! ”

“ It wouldn't be half a bad end, to finish one's last ride in a headlong plunge over the cliff—to know none of the gruesome details of dissolution—nothing but a sense of being hurled through bright air, forty fathoms deep into bright water. ”

“ A mountain of flame, thirty feet high, and of unknown length, moving onward, roaring like "many waters"—in a gentle, stately movement, and unbroken front—then impelled by a gust of wind, suddenly breaks itself to pieces, here and there shooting ahead, whirling itself high in air—all becomes noise, and strife, and uproar, and disorder. ”

“ Nothing belonging to a living world-- everything to a dead world, where avalanches, rolling from the summits of the mountains, would disperse noiselessly at the bottom of the abyss, retaining the motion, but wanting the sound. ”

“ The fall it will be his; and though I strive and strain,
One blow will close my eyes, and I shall never waken.
THE SEA-REAPERS When the Four Winds, the Wrestlers, strive with the Sun,
When the Sun is slain in the dark ”

“ For thus When the wind beats upon us stroke by stroke And when the sharp cold streams, 'tis not our wont To feel each private particle of wind Or of that cold, but rather all at once; And so we see how blows affect our body, As if one thing were beating on the same And giving us the feel of its own body Outside of us. Again, whene'er we thump With finger-tip upon a stone, we touch But the rock's surface and the outer hue, Nor feel that hue by contact—rather feel The very hardness deep within the rock. Now come, and why beyond a looking-glass An image may be seen, perceive. ”