unspeakably beautiful. You are in a mansion carved out of the
granite foundations of the earth, with walls two or three thousand
feet high, hung here and there with snow-white waterfalls, and
supporting the blue sky on domes and pinnacles still higher. Oh, the
calmness and majesty of the scene! the evidence of such tremendous
activity of some force, some agent, and now so tranquil, so
sheltering, so beneficent!

That there should be two or three Yosemites in the Sierra not very
far apart, all with the main features singularly alike, is very
significant--as if this kind of valley was latent in the granite of
that region--some peculiarity of rock structure that lends itself
readily to these formations. The Sierra lies beyond the southern
limit of the great continental ice-sheet of late Tertiary times, but
it nursed and reared many local glaciers, and to the eroding power
of these its Yosemites are partly due. But water was at work here
long before the ice--eating down into the granite and laying open
the mountain for the ice to begin its work. Ice may come, and ice
may go, says the river, but I go on forever. Water tends to make a
V-shaped valley, ice a U-shaped one, though in the Hawaiian Islands,
where water erosion alone has taken place, the prevailing form of
the valleys is that of the U-shaped. Yosemite approximates to this
shape, and ice has certainly played a part in its formation. But the
glacier seems to have stopped at the outlet of the great valley; it
did not travel beyond the gigantic hall it had helped to excavate.
The valley of the Merced from the mouth of Yosemite downward is an
open valley strewn with huge angular granite rocks and shows no
signs of glaciation whatever. The reason of this abruptness is quite
beyond my ken. It is to me a plausible theory that when the granite
that forms the Sierra was lifted or squeezed up by the shrinking of