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4. THE YOSEMITE VALLEY.

1. The Yosemite Valley is situated in the middle region of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, on the Merced River. It is about seven miles long, with an average width of a mile and a half.

2. The elevation of the floor of the valley above the level of the sea is four thousand feet. The walls average three thousand feet in height, and are made up of a series of stupendous granite rocks, varying greatly in form and size, and partially separated from one another by deep side-gorges.

3. The bottom of the valley is remarkably smooth and level, but the walls are angular and bare. The meadows and sandy flats support a luxuriant growth of sedges, ferns, and thickets of azalea, ceanothus, and brierrose. Near the foot of the walls there are magnificent groves of live-oaks and pines. The openings between these are enlivened with countless flowers, such as asters, golden-rods, lilies, mints, and violets, growing in beds and bunches.

4. Fine streams, fed by mountain snows, come foaming down over the rocks into the valley, and unite to form the Merced River. In leaping the lofty walls, they give rise to some of the grandest water-falls in the world. The highest of these, known as the Yosemite Falls, has a descent of two thousand six hundred feet.

5. When the Yosemite was discovered, it was supposed to be the only valley of the kind; but nature is not so poor as to possess only one of any thing. When, therefore, we explore the adjacent mountains, we find many other "Yosemite Valleys," identical in general characteristics, each presenting, on a varying scale, the same kind of mural precipices, level meadows, and lofty water-falls. 6. The Merced Yosemite was created by the action of

five immense glaciers, traces of which still exist upon every rock in the valley. When we follow their retiring footsteps into the highest summits of the Sierra Nevada, we find some of these glaciers still alive, lingering beneath cool shadows, and silently completing the sculpture of the lofty peaks.

DEFINITIONS.

muʼral, pertaining to a wall.
a za le a, a flowering shrub of the
heath family.
gorges, canyons.

ce a no'thus, California lilac.
i denʼti cal, the same.

JOHN MUIR.

glacier, (gla'seer, or glas'i er), an immense mass of ice, or snow and ice, formed in the region of perpetual snow, and moving slowly down mountain slopes or valleys.

COMPOSITION. Close the books, and write all you can remember of this description. Exchange papers, and read one another's compositions to the class.

SUPPLEMENTARY. Turn to your school geography, find, on the map, the situation of the Yosemite Valley, and read the description given in the special state geography.

5. SCENERY OF YOSEMITE VALLEY.

1. A fresh impression of the marvels of nature always awakens a religious emotion. I thought of this more seriously than ever before, when, about two weeks ago, 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 this 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.

3. More than a thousand feet beneath us was the arching head of a water-fall, 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. 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.

5. The Himalayas alone can furnish competitors for its falls and turrets, if any portion of the earth can. We often read, in accounts of mountain districts or mountain-climbing, about precipices that are thousands of feet in descent, or of cliffs that spring naked and sheer to an equal height. The statements, however, are almost always extravagant exaggerations.

6. 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 water-fall and see, forty-three hundred feet over his head, the edge of a mountain wall that shields the water from the early afternoon sun. 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

7. 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 eye to wander up at leisure the magnificent battlement called "El Capitan."

8. 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 any thing green can lodge and grow. There is no mark or line of stratification. There is no crack in its huge mass. It is one

piece of solid, savage granite.

9. But what words shall describe the beauty of one of the water-falls, as we see it plunging from the brow

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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.

10. 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.

11. 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!

12. 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 twenty-eight 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.

13. 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! And

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