huge glowing domes and ridges, shadowy gulfs and canyons, and
feather-edged ravines is being tried, they vanish, leaving no visible
ruins. Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and
significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both
alike are built up and die, and in God's calendar difference of duration
is nothing. We can only dream about them in wondering, worshiping
admiration, happier than we dare tell even to friends who see farthest
in sympathy, glad to know that not a crystal or vapor particle of them,
hard or soft, is lost; that they sink and vanish only to rise again and
again in higher and higher beauty. As to our own work, duty, influence,
etc., concerning which so much fussy pother is made, it will not fail of
its due effect, though, like a lichen on a stone, we keep silent.

_July 24._ Clouds at noon occupying about half the sky gave half an hour
of heavy rain to wash one of the cleanest landscapes in the world. How
well it is washed! The sea is hardly less dusty than the ice-burnished
pavements and ridges, domes and canyons, and summit peaks plashed with
snow like waves with foam. How fresh the woods are and calm after the
last films of clouds have been wiped from the sky! A few minutes ago
every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling,
tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though
to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.
Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fibre
thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the
balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first
temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and
churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself. The same
may be said of stone temples. Yonder, to the eastward of our camp grove,
stands one of Nature's cathedrals, hewn from the living rock, almost
conventional in form, about two thousand feet high, nobly adorned with
spires and pinnacles, thrilling under floods of sunshine as if alive
like a grove-temple, and well named "Cathedral Peak." Even Shepherd
Billy turns at times to this wonderful mountain building, though
apparently deaf to all stone sermons. Snow that refused to melt in fire
would hardly be more wonderful than unchanging dullness in the rays of
God's beauty. I have been trying to get him to walk to the brink of
Yosemite for a