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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