xperiment of a contented
community, without any poverty and without excessive wealth.

CHAPTER XV.

SOME WONDERS BY THE WAY.--YOSEMITE.--MARIPOSA TREES.--MONTEREY.

I went to it with reluctance. I shrink from attempting to say anything
about it. If you knew that there was one spot on the earth where Nature
kept her secret of secrets, the key to the action of her most gigantic
and patient forces through the long eras, the marvel of constructive and
destructive energy, in features of sublimity made possible to mental
endurance by the most exquisite devices of painting and sculpture, the
wonder which is without parallel or comparison, would you not hesitate
to approach it? Would you not wander and delay with this and that
wonder, and this and that beauty and nobility of scenery, putting off
the day when the imagination, which is our highest gift, must be
extinguished by the reality? The mind has this judicious timidity. Do we
not loiter in the avenue of the temple, dallying with the vista of giant
plane-trees and statues, and noting the carving and the color, mentally
shrinking from the moment when the full glory shall burst upon us? We
turn and look when we are near a summit, we pick a flower, we note the
shape of the clouds, the passing breeze, before we take the last step
that shall reveal to us the vast panorama of mountains and valleys.

I cannot bring myself to any description of the Grand Canon of the
Colorado by any other route, mental or physical, than that by which we
reached it, by the way of such beauty as Monterey, such a wonder as the
Yosemite, and the infinite and picturesque deserts of New Mexico and
Arizona. I think the mind needs the training in the desert scenery to
enable it to grasp the unique sublimity of the Grand Canon.

The road to the Yosemite, after leaving the branch of the Southern
Pacific at Raymond, is an unnecessarily fatiguing one. The journey by
stage--sixty-five miles--is accomplished in less than two
days--thirty-nine miles the first day, and twenty-six the second. The
driving is necessarily slow, because two mountain ridges have to be
surmounted, at an elevation each of about 6500 feet. The road is not a
"road" at all as the term is understood in Switzerland, Spain, or in any
highly civilized region--that is, a graded, smooth, hard, and
sufficiently broad track. It is a makeshift highway, generally narrow
(often too narrow for two teams to pass), cast up with loose material,