five hundred feet in its plunge, dashing from a
break or depression in a cliff thirty-two hundred feet sheer.

A writer who visited this valley in September, calls the cataract a mere
tape line of water dropped from the sky. Perhaps it is so, toward the
close of the dry season; but as we saw it, the blended majesty and beauty
of it, apart from the general sublimities of Yosemite gorge, would repay a
journey of a thousand miles. There was no deficiency of water. It was a
powerful stream, thirty-five feet broad, fresh from the Nevada, that made
the plunge from the brow of the awful precipice.

At the first leap it clears fourteen hundred and ninety-seven feet; then
it tumbles down a series of steep stairways four hundred and two feet, and
then makes a jump to the meadows five hundred and eighteen feet more. But
it is the upper and highest cataract that is most wonderful to the eye, as
well as most musical. The cliff is so sheer that there is no break in the
body of the water during the whole of its descent of more than a quarter
of a mile. It pours in a curve from the summit, fifteen hundred feet, to
the basin that hoards it but a moment for the cascades that follow.

And what endless complexities and opulence of beauty in the forms and
motions of the cataract! It is comparatively narrow at the top of the
precipice, although, as we said, the tide that pours over is thirty-five
feet broad. But it widens as it descends, and curves a little on one side
as it widens, so that it shapes itself, before it reaches its first bowl
of granite, into the figure of a comet. More beautiful than the comet,
however, we can see the substance of this watery loveliness ever renew
itself and ever pour itself away.

"It mounts in spray the skies, and thence again
Returns in an unceasing shower, which round
With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain,
Is an eternal April to the ground,
Making it all one emerald;--how profound
The gulf! and how the giant element
From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,
Crushing the cliffs."

The cataract seems to shoot out a thousand serpentine heads or knots of
water, which wriggle down deliberately through the air and expend
themselves in mist before half the descent is over. Then a new set burst
from the body and sides of the fall, with the same fortune on the
remaining distance; and thus the most charming fretwork of watery nodules,
each trailing its vapory train for a hundred