One moment, seeking to express For food and shelter, warmth and health, 10. Within our beds awhile we heard The wind that round the gables roared, J. G. WHITTIER. LXXXVI. SCENERY OF THE YOSEMITE VALLEY. THOMAS STARR KING (1824-1864) was born in the State of New York. His life was mostly spent in Boston, but his last years were passed in California. He was a Unitarian minister, a popular lecturer, and a man of wonderful eloquence of speech. He was a loyal supporter of the cause of the Union in the Civil War. He contributed many able articles to the magazines of the time. 1. A FRESH impression of the marvels of nature always awakens a religious emotion. I thought of this more seriously than ever before, when I first looked down from the Mariposa trail into the tremendous fissure of the Sierras. The place is fitly called "Inspiration Point." The shock to the senses there, as one rides out from the level and sheltered forest, up to which our horses had been climbing two days, is scarcely less than if he had been instantly borne to a region where the Creator reveals more of Himself in his works than can be learned from the ordinary scenery of the world. 2. We stood, almost without warning, on the summit of the southerly wall of the valley, and obtained our first impression of its depth and grandeur by looking down. A vast trench, cloven by Omnipotence amid a tumult of mountains, yawned beneath us. The length of it was seven or eight miles; the sides of it were bare rock, and they were perpendicular. They did not flow or subside to the valley in charming curve-lines, such as I have seen in the wildest passes of the New England mountains. The walls were firm and sheer. A man could have found places where he could have jumped three thousand feet in one descent to the valley. More than a thousand feet beneath us was the arching head of a waterfall, that leaped another thousand before its widening spray shattered itself into finer mists in a rocky dell. The roar of it, at our elevation, was a slight murmur. On the wall opposite, about a mile across the gulf, a brook was pouring itself to the valley. 3. Although it was slipping down more than half a mile of undisturbed depth, it appeared to be creeping at its own will and leisure. We could not believe that the awful force of gravitation was controlling it. "But, like a downward smoke, the slender stream Along the cliff to fall, and pause, and fall, did seem." Noble trees of two hundred feet stature, by the riverside below were tiny shrubs. The river itself lay like a bow of glass upon the curved green meadow which nestled so peacefully under the shadow of the Egyptian walls. And off from the northernmost cliff, retreating a mile or two from it, soared a bare, wedge-like summit of one of the Sierras - ashy in hue, springing above a vast field of snow which could not cling to its steep smoothness, but lay quietly melting to feed the foam and music of a cataract. 4. So far as we know, the Yosemite Valley offers the most stupendous specimens of natural masonry to be seen on our globe. Switzerland has no gorge that compares with it. The desolate and splintered walls of Sinai and Horeb are not a quarter so high. No explored district of the highest Andes displays such masses of clean, abrupt rock. The Himalayas alone can furnish competitors for its falls and turrets. 5. But in the Yosemite, a man may ride close to a crag whose summit, as he holds his head back to discern it, is more than three thousand feet above him. He may stand in the spray of a waterfall and see, forty-three hundred feet over his head, the edge of a mountain wall that shields the water from the early afternoon sun. He may look up to a tower which resembles an incomplete spire of a Gothic minster, and see its broken edges, softened by more than three-quarters of a mile of distance, directly above his eyes. He may sit at an evening, when the sun has retreated from every portion of the valley, and look at the South Dome," a vast globe of bold rock almost a full mile in height, while the sunset is sheathing it with impalpable gold. Or he may lie at noon beneath a tree at the base of one wall of the valley, and allow his eyes to wander up at leisure the magnificent battlement called "El Capitan." It is not so high as some of the others I have named, for it is a little less than four thousand feet. But there is not a crevice in it where anything green can lodge and grow. There is no mark or line of stratification. It is one piece of solid, savage granite. 6. But what words shall describe the beauty of one of the waterfalls, as we see it plunging from the brow of a cliff nearly three thousand feet high, and clearing fifteen hundred feet in one leap? It is comparatively narrow at the top of the precipice; but it widens as it descends, and curves a little as it widens, so that it shapes itself, before it reaches its first bowl of granite, into the charming figure of the comet that glowed on our sky some years ago. But, more beautiful than the comet, you can see the substance of this watery loveliness ever renew itself, and ever pour itself away. And all over its white and swaying mistiness, which now and then swings along the mountain-side at the persuasion of the wind, like a pendulum of lace, and now and then is whirled round and round by some eddying breeze as though the gust meant to see if it could wring it dry all over its surface, as it falls, are shooting rockets of water, which spend themselves by the time they half reach the bottom, and then re-form for the remaining descent—thus fascinating the gazer so that he could lie for hours, never tired, but ever hungry for more of the exquisite witchery of liquid motion and grace. 7. How little we see of nature! How utterly powerless are our senses to take any measure or impression of the actual grandeur of what we do see! Think of being moved religiously by looking at a pinnacle or bluff four thousand feet high, and then think what the earth contains which might move us! What if one of the Himalayas could be cloven from its topmost tile of ice to its torrid base, so that we could look up a sheer wall of twentyeight thousand feet- the equator at the bottom, and at the apex perpetual polar frost! And then think that the loftiest Himalaya is only a slight excrescence on the planet. What if we could have a vision, for a moment, of the earth's diameter, from a point where we could look each way along all its strata and its core of fire, in lines each four thousand miles in their stretch! 8. And then remember that this is nothing-this is not a unit-inch towards measuring the diameter of the earth's orbit, and that earth and orbit both are invisible and undreamed of from the pole star or Sirius, which is the apex of a reach of space that we can write in figures, but which we could not have counted off yet if we had begun six thousand years ago and given each second to a mile! Or what if we could turn from the delight at seeing a waterfall of fifteen hundred feet, which looks like the tail of a comet, and could get a sensuous impression of the actual trail of that light upon the sky, a cataract of luminous spray, steady, and true, a hundred and twenty millions of miles in extent more than the distance between us and the sun! And yet this is but one spot upon the dark immensity! THOMAS S. KING. LXXXVII. THANATOPSIS. THANATOPSIS is a compound Greek word, meaning a View of Death; or it may be translated, "Reflections on Death." WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878). Of the one hundred and seventy-one poems written by Byrant, more than one hundred treat of nature; hence his title, "The first poet of American nature." Bryant's mind early developed poetic power. He wrote verses at the age of nine years; and published a volume of poems at the age of fifteen. Thanatopsis, his greatest work, was written at nineteen. He entered Williams College at sixteen, and was admitted to the bar at twenty-one. Bryant's early home was at Cum WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, mington, Massachusetts. In 1826 he removed to New York city, and for the last thirty years of his life he lived at Roslyn, Long Island. In addition to his literary work, |