ickets
of snow-pressed ceanothus; then down a broad, majestic stairway into the
ice-sculptured lake-basin.

The snow on the high mountains is melting fast, and the streams are
singing bank-full, swaying softly through the level meadows and bogs,
quivering with sun-spangles, swirling in pot-holes, resting in deep
pools, leaping, shouting in wild, exulting energy over rough boulder
dams, joyful, beautiful in all their forms. No Sierra landscape that I
have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in
manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean
and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest
attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes
visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well
interest us. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our
own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping
to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers.
Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more
visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are
fountains--beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal
ken.

I found three kinds of meadows: (1) Those contained in basins not yet
filled with earth enough to make a dry surface. They are planted with
several species of carex, and have their margins diversified with robust
flowering plants such as veratrum, larkspur, lupine, etc. (2) Those
contained in the same sort of basins, once lakes like the first, but so
situated in relation to the streams that flow through them and beds of
transportable sand, gravel, etc., that they are now high and dry and
well drained. This dry condition and corresponding difference in their
vegetation may be caused by no superiority of position, or power of
transporting filling material in the streams that belong to them, but
simply by the basin being shallow and therefore sooner filled. They are
planted with grasses, mostly fine, silky, and rather short-leaved,
_Calamagrostis_ and _Agrostis_ being the principal genera. They form
delightfully smooth, level sods in which one finds two or three species
of gentian and as many of purple and yellow orthocarpus, violet,
vaccinium, kalmia, bryanthus, and lonicera. (3) Meadows hanging on ridge
and mountain slopes, not in basins at all, but made an