booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the spruce trees that
towered around us, and felt the tender, brooding spirit of the great
valley, itself touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every
hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls--surely that was a
night none of us can ever forget. As Yosemite can stand the broad,
searching light of midday and not be cheapened, so its enchantments
can stand the light of the moon and the stars and not be rendered
too vague and impalpable.




III



Going from the Grand Canon to Yosemite is going from one sublimity
to another of a different order. The canon is the more strange,
unearthly, apocryphal, appeals more to the imagination, and is the
more overwhelming in its size, its wealth of color, and its
multitude of suggestive forms. But for quiet majesty and beauty,
with a touch of the sylvan and pastoral, too, Yosemite stands alone.
One could live with Yosemite, camp in it, tramp in it, winter and
summer in it, and find nature in her tender and human, almost
domestic moods, as well as in her grand and austere. But I do not
think one could ever feel at home in or near the Grand Canon; it is
too unlike anything we have ever known upon the earth; it is like a
vision of some strange colossal city uncovered from the depth of
geologic time. You may have come to it, as we did, from the
Petrified Forests, where you saw the silicified trunks of thousands