ost enough
for crystal building,--glorious fields of ice-diamonds destined to last
but a night. How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating,
destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever
changing, ever beautiful.

Mr. Delaney arrived this morning. Felt not a trace of loneliness while
he was gone. On the contrary, I never enjoyed grander company. The whole
wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very
stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly. No wonder when we
consider that we all have the same Father and Mother.

_August 31._ Clouds .05. Silky cirrus wisps and fringes so fine they
almost escape notice. Frost enough for another crop of crystals on the
meadows but none on the forests. The gentians, goldenrods, asters, etc.,
don't seem to feel it; neither petals nor leaves are touched though they
seem so tender. Every day opens and closes like a flower, noiseless,
effortless. Divine peace glows on all the majestic landscape like the
silent enthusiastic joy that sometimes transfigures a noble human face.

_September 1._ Clouds .05--motionless, of no particular color--ornaments
with no hint of rain or snow in them. Day all calm--another grand throb
of Nature's heart, ripening late flowers and seeds for next summer, full
of life and the thoughts and plans of life to come, and full of ripe and
ready death beautiful as life, telling divine wisdom and goodness and
immortality. Have been up Mount Dana, making haste to see as much as I
can now that the time of departure is drawing nigh. The views from the
summit reach far and wide, eastward over the Mono Lake and Desert;
mountains beyond mountains looking strangely barren and gray and bare
like heaps of ashes dumped from the sky. The lake, eight or ten miles in
diameter, shines like a burnished disk of silver, no trees about its
gray, ashy, cindery shores. Looking westward, the glorious forests are
seen sweeping over countless ridges and hills, girdling domes and
subordinate mountains, fringing in long curving lines the dividing
ridges, and filling every hollow where the glaciers have spread
soil-beds however rocky or smooth. Looking northward and southward along
the axis of the range, you see the glorious array of high mountains,
crags and peaks and snow, the fountain-heads of rivers that are flowing
west to the sea through the famous Golden Gate, and east to hot salt
lakes and deserts to evaporate and hurry back into