mountains and forests are coming
from far and near, densing into one close assemblage; for the sun, their
god and father, with love ineffable, is glowing a sunset farewell. Not
one of all the assembled rocks or trees seemed remote. How impressively
their faces shone with responsive love!

I ran home in the moonlight with firm strides; for the sun-love made
me strong. Down through the junipers; down through the firs; now in
jet shadows, now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare, clanking
rocks; past the huge ghost of South Dome rising weird through the firs;
past the glorious fall of Nevada, the groves of Illilouette; through the
pines of the valley; beneath the bright crystal sky blazing with stars.
All of this mountain wealth in one day!--one of the rich ripe days that
enlarge one's life; so much of the sun upon one side of it, so much of
the moon and stars on the other.

III. Summer Days at Mount Shasta

Mount Shasta rises in solitary grandeur from the edge of a comparatively
low and lightly sculptured lava plain near the northern extremity of the
Sierra, and maintains a far more impressive and commanding individuality
than any other mountain within the limits of California. Go where you
may, within a radius of from fifty to a hundred miles or more, there
stands before you the colossal cone of Shasta, clad in ice and snow, the
one grand unmistakable landmark--the pole star of the landscape. Far
to the southward Mount Whitney lifts its granite summit four or five
hundred feet higher than Shasta, but it is nearly snowless during the
late summer, and is so feebly individualized that the traveler may
search for it in vain among the many rival peaks crowded along the axis
of the range to north and south of it, which all alike are crumbling
residual masses brought into relief in the degradation of the general
mass of the range. The highest point on Mount Shasta, as determined by
the State Geological Survey, is 14,440 feet above mean tide. That of
Whitney, computed from fewer observations, is about 14,900 feet. But
inasmuch as the average elevation of the plain out of which Shasta rises
is only about four thousand feet above the sea, while the actual base of
the peak of Mount Whitney lies at an elevation of eleven thousand feet,
the individual height of the former is about two and a half times as
great as that of the latter.

Approaching Shasta from the south, one obtains glimpses of its snowy
cone here a