TIME AND CHANGE 



the spell of the brooding calm and sheltered seclu 

 sion that pervades it. You pass suddenly from the 

 tumultuous, the chaotic, into the ordered, the tran 

 quil, the restful, which seems enhanced by the power 

 and grandeur that encompass them about. You 

 can hardly be prepared for the hush that suddenly 

 falls upon the river and for the gentle rural and 

 sylvan character of much that surrounds you; the 

 peace of the fields, the seclusion of the woods, the 

 privacy of sunny glades, the enchantment of falls 

 and lucid waters, with a touch of human occupancy 

 here and there all this, set in that enormous 

 granite frame, three or four thousand feet high, 

 ornamented with domes and spires and peaks still 

 higher, it is all this that wins your heart and fills 

 your imagination in the Yosemite. 



As you ride or walk along the winding road up the 

 level valley amid the noble pines and spruces and 

 oaks, and past the groves and bits of meadow and 

 the camps of many tents, and the huge mossy gran 

 ite boulders here and there reposing in the shade of 

 the trees, with the full, clear, silent river winding 

 through the plain near you, you are all the time 

 aware of those huge vertical walls, their faces scarred 

 and niched, streaked with color, or glistening with 

 moisture, and animated with waterfalls, rising up 

 on either hand, thousands of feet high, not archi 

 tectural, or like something builded, but like the sides 

 and the four corners of the globe itself. What an 

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