onate ecstatic
pleasure-glow not explainable. One's body then seems homogeneous
throughout, sound as a crystal. Perched like a fly on this Yosemite
dome, I gaze and sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb
admiration without definite hope of ever learning much, yet with the
longing, unresting effort that lies at the door of hope, humbly
prostrate before the vast display of God's power, and eager to offer
self-denial and renunciation with eternal toil to learn any lesson in
the divine manuscript.

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite
grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so
delicately harmonized they are mostly hidden. Sheer precipices three
thousand feet high are fringed with tall trees growing close like grass
on the brow of a lowland hill, and extending along the feet of these
precipices a ribbon of meadow a mile wide and seven or eight long, that
seems like a strip a farmer might mow in less than a day. Waterfalls,
five hundred to one or two thousand feet high, are so subordinated to
the mighty cliffs over which they pour that they seem like wisps of
smoke, gentle as floating clouds, though their voices fill the valley
and make the rocks tremble. The mountains, too, along the eastern sky,
and the domes in front of them, and the succession of smooth rounded
waves between, swelling higher, higher, with dark woods in their
hollows, serene in massive exuberant bulk and beauty, tend yet more to
hide the grandeur of the Yosemite temple and make it appear as a subdued
subordinate feature of the vast harmonious landscape. Thus every attempt
to appreciate any one feature is beaten down by the overwhelming
influence of all the others. And, as if this were not enough, lo! in the
sky arises another mountain range with topography as rugged and
substantial-looking as the one beneath it--snowy peaks and domes and
shadowy Yosemite valleys--another version of the snowy Sierra, a new
creation heralded by a thunder-storm. How fiercely, devoutly wild is
Nature in the midst of her beauty-loving tenderness!--painting lilies,
watering them, caressing them with gentle hand, going from flower to
flower like a gardener while building rock mountains and cloud mountains
full of lightning and rain. Gladly we run for shelter beneath an
overhanging cliff and examine the reassuring ferns and mosses, gentle
love tokens growing in cracks and chinks. Daisies, too, and ivesias,
conf