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
of gigantic trees or tree ferns, that grew millions of years ago,
most of them uncovered, but many of them protruding from banks of
clay and gravel, and in their interiors rich in all the colors of
the rainbow, and you wonder if you may not now be gazing upon some
petrified antediluvian city of temples and holy places exhumed by
mysterious hands and opened up to the vulgar gaze of to-day. You
look into it from above and from another world and you descend into
it at your peril. Yosemite you enter as into a gigantic hall and
make your own; the canon you gaze down upon, and are an alien,
whether you enter it or not. Yosemite is carved out of the most
majestic and enduring of all rocks, granite; the Grand Canon is
carved out of one of the most beautiful, but perishable, red
Carboniferous sandstone and limestone. There is a maze of beautiful
and intricate lines in the latter, a wilderness of temple-like forms
and monumental remains, and noble architectural profiles that
delight while they bewilder the eye. Yosemite has much greater
simplicity, and is much nearer the classic standard of beauty. Its
grand and austere features predominate, of course, but underneath
these and adorning them are many touches of the idyllic and the
picturesque. Its many waterfalls fluttering like white lace against
its vertical granite walls, its smooth, level floor, its noble pines
and oaks, its open glades, its sheltering groves, its bright, clear,
winding river, its soft voice of many waters, its flowers, its
birds, its grass, its verdure, even its orchards of blooming apple
trees, all inclosed in this tremendous granite frame--what an
unforgettable picture it all makes, what a blending of the sublime
and the homelike and familiar it all is! It is the waterfalls that
make the granite alive, and bursting into bloom as it were. What a
touch they give! how they enliven the scene! What music they evoke
from these harps of stone!
The first leap of Yosemite Falls is sixteen hundred feet--sixteen
hundred feet of a compact mass of snowy rockets shooting downward
and bursting into spray around which rainbows flit and hover. The
next leap is four hundred feet, and the last six hundred. We tried
to get near the foot and inspect the hidden recess in which this
airy spirit again took on a more tangible form of still, running
water, but the spray over a large area fell like a summer shower,
drenching the trees and the rocks, and holding the inquisitive
tourist off at a safe distance. We had to beat a retreat with
dripping garments before we had got within fifty yards of the foot
of the fall. At first I was surprised at the volume of water that
came hurrying out of the hidden recess of dripping rocks and
trees--a swiftly flowing stream, thirty or forty feet wide, and four
or five feet deep. How could that comparatively narrow curtain of
white spray up there give birth to such a full robust stream? But I
saw that in making the tremendous leap from the top of the
precipice, the stream was suddenly drawn out, as we stretch a rubber
band in our hands, and that the solid and massive current below was
like the rubber again relaxed. The strain was over, and the united
waters deepened and slowed up over their rocky bed.
Yosemite for a home or a camp, the Grand Canon for a spectacle. I
have spoken of the robin I saw in Yosemite Valley. Think how forlorn
and out of place a robin would seem in the Grand Canon! What would
he do there? There is no turf for him to inspect, and there are no
trees for him to perch on. I should as soon expect to find him amid
the pyramids of Egypt, or amid the ruins of Karnak. The bluebird was
in the Yosemite also, and the water-ouzel haunted the lucid waters.
I noticed a peculiarity of the oak in Yosemite that I never saw
elsewhere [Footnote: I have since observed the same trait in the
oaks in Georgia--probably a characteristic of this tree in southern
latitudes.]--a fluid or outflowing condition of the growth
aboveground, such as one usually sees in the roots of trees--so that
it tended to envelop and swallow, as it were, any solid object with
which it came in contact. If its trunk touched a point of rock, it
would put out great oaken lips several inches in extent as if to
draw the rock into its maw. If a dry limb was cut or broken off, a
foot from the trunk, these thin oaken lips would slowly creep out
and envelop it--a sort of Western omnivorous trait appearing in the
trees.
Whitman refers to "the slumbering and liquid trees." These Yosemite
oaks recall his expression more surely than any of our Eastern
trees.
The reader may create for himself a good image of Yosemite by
thinking of a section of seven or eight miles of the Hudson River,
midway of its course, as emptied of its water and deepened three
thousand feet or more, having the sides nearly vertical, with
snow-white waterfalls fluttering against them here and there, the
famous spires and domes planted along the rim, and the landscape of
groves and glades, with its still, clear winding river, occupying
the bottom.