song the fall and cascades are singing?

The water-ground chips and knots that I found fastened between the
rocks kept my fire alive all through the night. Next morning I rose
nerved and ready for another day of sketching and noting, and any form
of climbing. I escaped from the gorge about noon, after accomplishing
some of the most delicate feats of mountaineering I ever attempted;
and here the canyon is all broadly open again--the floor luxuriantly
forested with pine, and spruce, and silver fir, and brown-trunked
libocedrus. The walls rise in Yosemite forms, and Tenaya Creek comes
down seven hundred feet in a white brush of foam. This is a little
Yosemite valley. It is about two thousand feet above the level of the
main Yosemite, and about twenty-four hundred below Lake Tenaya.

I found the lake frozen, and the ice was so clear and unruffled that
the surrounding mountains and the groves that look down upon it were
reflected almost as perfectly as I ever beheld them in the calm
evening mirrors of summer. At a little distance, it was difficult to
believe the lake frozen at all; and when I walked out on it,
cautiously stamping at short intervals to test the strength of the
ice, I seemed to walk mysteriously, without adequate faith, on the
surface of the water. The ice was so transparent that I could see
through it the beautifully wave-rippled, sandy bottom, and the scales
of mica glinting back the down-pouring light. When I knelt down with
my face close to the ice, through which the sunbeams were pouring, I
was delighted to discover myriads of Tyndall's six-rayed water
flowers, magnificently colored.

A grand old mountain mansion is this Tenaya region! In the glacier
period it was a mer de glace, far grander than the mer de glace of