Five miles west of Yosemite,
July 11, [1869.]
I need not try to tell you how sorely I am pained by this bitter
disappointment. Your Mariposa note of June 22 did not reach Black’s
until July 3d, and I did not receive it until the 6th.
I met a shepherd a few miles from here yesterday who told me that a
letter from Yosemite for me was at Harding’s Mills. I have not yet
received it. No dependence can be placed upon the motions of letters in
the mountains, and I feared this result on my not receiving anything
definite concerning your time of leaving Stockton before I left the
plains. I wish now that I had not been entangled with sheep at all but
that I had remained among post-offices and joined your party at Snellings.
Thus far all of my deepest, purest enjoyments have been taken in solitude,
and the fate seems hard that has hindered me from sharing Yosemite with
you.
We are camped this evening among a bundle of the Merced’s crystal
arteries, which have just gone far enough from their silent fountain to
be full of lakelets and lilies [?], and the bleating of our flock can
neither confuse nor hush the thousand notes of their celestial song.
The sun has set, and these glorious shafts of the spruce and pine shoot
higher and higher as the darkness comes on. I must say good night while
bonds of Nature’s sweetest influences are about me in these sacred
mountain halls, and I know that every chord of your being has throbbed
and tingled with the same mysterious powers when you were here. Farewell.
I am glad to know that you have been allowed to bathe your existence in
God’s glorious Sierra Nevadas and sorry that I could not meet you.