7.

THE FALLS OF THE YOSEMITE.

The Yosemite Valley, in California, is a pass about eight miles long. At its eastern extremity it leads into three narrower passes, each of which extends several miles, winding by the wildest paths into the heart of the Sierra Nevada chain of mountains. For seven miles of the main valley, which varies in width from three quarters of a mile to a mile and a half, the walls on either side are from two thousand to nearly five thousand feet above the road, and are nearly perpendicular. From these walls, rocky splinters a thousand feet in height start up, and every winter drop winter drop a few hundred tons of granite, to adorn the base of the rampart with picturesque ruin.

The valley is of such irregular width, and bends so much and often so abruptly, that there is a great variety and frequent surprise in the forms and combinations of the overhanging rocks as one rides along the bank of the stream. The patches of luxuriant meadow, with their dazzling green, and the grouping of the superb firs, two hundred feet high, that skirt them, and that shoot above the stout and graceful oaks and sycamores through which the horse-path winds, are delightful rests of sweetness and beauty amid the threatening awful

ness.

The Merced, which flows through the same pass, is a noble stream, a hundred feet wide and ten feet deep. It is formed chiefly of the streams that leap and rush through the narrower passes, and it is swollen, also, by the bounty of the marvellous water-falls that pour down from the ramparts of the wider valley. The sublime poetry of Habakkuk is needed to describe the impression, and, perhaps, the geology, of these mighty fissures: "Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers."

At the foot of the break-neck declivity of nearly three thousand feet by which we reach the banks of the Merced, we are six miles from the hotel, and every rod of the ride awakens wonder, awe, and a solemn joy. As we approach the hotel, and turn toward the opposite bank of the river, what is that

"Which ever sounds and shines,

A pillar of white light upon the wall,
Of purple cliffs aloof descried"?

That, reader, is the highest waterfall in the world -the Yosemite cataract, nearly twenty-five hundred feet in its plunge, dashing from a break or depression in a cliff thirty-two hundred feet sheer.

A writer who visited this valley in September, calls the cataract a mere tap-line of water dropped from the sky. Perhaps it is so, toward the close of the dry season; but as we saw it, the blended

majesty and beauty of it, apart from the general sublimities of Yosemite gorge, would repay a journey of a thousand miles. There was no deficiency of water. It was a powerful stream, thirty-five feet broad, fresh from the Nevada, that made the plunge from the brow of the awful precipice.

At the first leap it clears fourteen hundred and ninety-seven feet; then it tumbles down a series of steep stairways four hundred and two feet, and then makes a jump to the meadows, five hundred and eighteen feet more. But it is the upper and highest cataract that is most wonderful to the eye, as well as most musical. The cliff is so sheer that there is no break in the body of the water during the whole of its descent of more than a quarter of a mile. It pours in a curve from the summit, fifteen hundred feet, to the basin that hoards it but a moment for the cascades that follow.

And what endless complexities and opulence of beauty in the forms and motions of the cataract! It is comparatively narrow at the top of the precipice, although, as we said, the tide that pours over is thirty-five feet broad. But it widens as it descends, and curves a little on one side as it widens, so that it shapes itself, before it reaches its first bowl of granite, into the figure of a comet. More beautiful than the comet, however, we can see the substance of this watery loveliness ever renew itself and ever pour itself away.

"It mounts in spray the skies, and thence again Returns in an unceasing shower, which round With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain,

Is an eternal April to the ground,

Making it all one emerald; - how profound
The gulf! and how the giant element

From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,
Crushing the cliffs.”

The cataract seems to shoot out a thousand serpentine heads or knots of water, which wriggle down deliberately through the air and expend themselves in mist before half the descent is over. Then a new set burst from the body and sides of the fall, with the same fortune on the remaining distance; and thus the most charming fretwork of watery nodules, each trailing its vapory train for a hundred feet or more, is woven all over the cascade, which swings, now and then, thirty feet each way, on the mountain side, as if it were a pendulum of watery lace. Once in a while, too, the wind manages to get back of the fall, between it and the cliff, and then it will whirl it round and round for two or three hundred feet, as if to try the experiment of twisting it to wring it dry.

Of course I visited the foot of the lowest fall of the Yosemite, and looked up through the spray, five hundred feet, to its crown. And I tried to climb to the base of the first or highest cataract,

but lost my way among the steep, sharp rocks, for

there is only one line by which the cliff can be scaled. But no nearer view that I found or heard described is comparable with the picture, from the hotel, of the comet-curve of the upper cataract, fifteen hundred feet high, and the two falls immediately beneath it, in which the same water leaps to the level of the quiet Merced.

-THOMAS STARR KING.

8.

DESCRIPTION OF A THUNDER-STORM.

It was the latter part of a calm, sultry day, that we floated gently with the tide between those stern mountains, -the Highlands of the Hudson. There was that perfect quiet which prevails over nature in the languor of summer heat; the turning of a plank, or the accidental falling of an oar on deck, was echoed from the mountain side, and reverberated along the shore; and if by chance the captain gave a shout of command, there were airy tongues that mocked it from every cliff.

I gazed about me, in mute delight and wonder, at these scenes of nature's magnificence. To the left, the Dunderberg reared its woody precipices, height over height, forest over forest, away in the deep summer sky. To the right, strutted forth the bold promontory of Antony's Nose, with a solitary eagle wheeling about it; while beyond, moun