e extent. The noble walls--sculptured
into endless variety of domes and gables, spires and battlements and
plain mural precipices--all a-tremble with the thunder tones of the
falling water. The level bottom seemed to be dressed like a garden--sunny
meadows here and there, and groves of pine and oak; the river of Mercy
sweeping in majesty through the midst of them and flashing back the
sunbeams. The great Tissiack, or Half-Dome, rising at the upper end of
the valley to a height of nearly a mile, is nobly proportioned and
life-like, the most impressive of all the rocks, holding the eye in
devout admiration, calling it back again and again from falls or meadows,
or even the mountains beyond,--marvelous cliffs, marvelous in sheer dizzy
depth and sculpture, types of endurance. Thousands of years have they
stood in the sky exposed to rain, snow, frost, earthquake and avalanche,
yet they still wear the bloom of youth.

I rambled along the valley rim to the westward; most of it is rounded
off on the very brink, so that it is not easy to find places where one
may look clear down the face of the wall to the bottom. When such places
were found, and I had cautiously set my feet and drawn my body erect, I
could not help fearing a little that the rock might split off and let me
down, and what a down!--more than three thousand feet. Still my limbs
did not tremble, nor did I feel the least uncertainty as to the reliance
to be placed on them. My only fear was that a flake of the granite,
which in some places showed joints more or less open and running
parallel with the face of the cliff, might give way. After withdrawing
from such places, excited with the view I had got, I would say to
myself, "Now don't go out on the verge again." But in the face of
Yosemite scenery cautious remonstrance is vain; under its spell one's
body seems to go where it likes with a will over which we seem to have
scarce any control.

After a mile or so of this memorable cliff work I approached Yosemite
Creek, admiring its easy, graceful, confident gestures as it comes
bravely forward in its narrow channel, singing the last of its mountain
songs on its way to its fate--a few rods more over the shining granite,
then down half a mile in showy foam to another world, to be lost in the
Merced, where climate, vegetation, inhabitants, all are different.
Emerging from its last gorge, it glides in wide lace-like rapids down a
smooth incline into a pool where it seems to