6, I took a sky-scraping journey to the great
states of Washington and Oregon. The climbing of Mt. Shasta and the
Siskyo range by train presented sublime views that no language can
even feebly describe. At the summits we were at least two miles in
the air higher than the dome of the Massachusetts State House. As
we climbed, I could see from the window of the palace car, the two
engines of our train puffing for all they were worth around the
curves, far ahead.

We looked down from the narrow rim of the railroad, thousands of feet
perpendicular upon foaming rivers dashing themselves into rainbows
and cataracts against the everlasting boulders in their courses.
Here cascades, miles in length, came rushing down the mountainsides,
shooting hundreds of feet into the air as they struck the giant rocks,
and at one place we stopped for half an hour to drink from the soda
springs pure, delicious soda water, huge geysers of it effervescing,
scintillating, silvery in the sunbeams, caught in a rocky basin from
which it is sent all over the world.

Above, the mighty Sacramento River has its source in a little spring,
almost touching the stars--so emblematical of our human life, which
begins in the infinite on high; is enveloped in a dust of earth;
expands in its evolution into the angel back into the eternity from
whence it came; for science reveals that the springs come from the
clouds as dew and rain, run their courses, and by evaporation are
taken back into their first home in the vapors of the heavens.

There are enormous log-shoots seeming like Jacob's ladder to reach
from earth to heaven, and in which, the giants of the vast mountain
forests are carried by water with almost lightning speed to the mills
on the river; there the splendid snow-covered dome of Shasta gleams
above the clouds like the great white throne described by St. John in
Revelation.

Now come glimpses of little green valleys; here and there, a few small
houses and flocks of sheep show that these cases are peopled "far from
the maddening crowd's ignoble strife."

These vast solitudes of forests are very impressive and solemn as
the day of judgment; giant fir-trees, pines and spruces, beautifully
clothed in perpetual green even to the lower dead limbs which nature
has covered with a verdure of moss--like our dead hopes, blasted
by the fires of adversity but made radiant by the fore-gleams of
immortality. There the bright mistletoe is suspended from dead
tr