In many places, especially in the middle region of the western flank of
the range, the main cañons widen into spacious valleys or parks,
diversified like artificial landscape-gardens, with charming groves and
meadows, and thickets of blooming bushes, while the lofty, retiring
walls, infinitely varied in form and sculpture, are fringed with ferns,
flowering-plants of many species, oaks, and evergreens, which find
anchorage on a thousand narrow steps and benches; while the whole is
enlivened and made glorious with rejoicing streams that come dancing and
foaming over the sunny brows of the cliffs to join the shining river
that flows in tranquil beauty down the middle of each one of them.

The walls of these park valleys of the Yosemite kind are made up of
rocks mountains in size, partly separated from each other by narrow
gorges and side-cañons; and they are so sheer in front, and so compactly
built together on a level floor, that, comprehensively seen, the parks
they inclose look like immense halls or temples lighted from above.
Every rock seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose;
others, absolutely sheer, or nearly so, for thousands of feet, advance
their brows in thoughtful attitudes beyond their companions, giving
welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly conscious yet heedless of
everything going on about them, awful in stern majesty, types of
permanence, yet associated with beauty of the frailest and most fleeting
forms; their feet set in pine-groves and gay emerald meadows, their
brows in the sky; bathed in light, bathed in floods of singing water,
while snow-clouds, avalanches, and the winds shine and surge and wreathe
about them as the years go by, as if into these mountain mansions Nature
had taken pains to gather her choicest treasures to draw her lovers into
close and confiding communion with her.

[Illustration: MOUNT TAMALPAIS--NORTH OF THE GOLDEN GATE.]