feet or more, is woven all
over the cascade, which swings, now and then, thirty feet each way, on the
mountain side, as if it were a pendulum of watery lace. Once in a while,
too, the wind manages to get back of the fall, between it and the cliff,
and then it will whirl it round and round for two or three hundred feet,
as if to try the experiment of twisting it to wring it dry.

Of course I visited the foot of the lowest fall of the Yosemite, and
looked up through the spray, five hundred feet, to its crown. And I tried
to climb to the base of the first or highest cataract, but lost my way
among the steep, sharp rocks, for there is only one line by which the
cliff can be scaled. But no nearer view that I found or heard described,
is comparable with the picture, from the hotel, of the comet curve of the
upper cataract, fifteen hundred feet high, and the two falls immediately
beneath it, in which the same water leaps to the level of the quiet
Merced.

CXXV. A PSALM OF LIFE. (429)

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act--act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead.

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;--

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
--Longfellow.

CXXVI. FRANKLIN'S ENTRY INTO PHILADELPHIA. (431)

Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790, was born in Boston. He received little
schooling, but being apprenticed to his brother, a printer, he