But everywhere, up and down that magic valley, whether viewed from the gorges that have their bottoms in dark and mystic abysses, or from amazing heights of walls thrust far into the skies, there is wonder piled upon wonder, grandeur overtopping rapture, dumfounded admiration riding at furious pace in the lead of inspiration, glorious realization gilding the visions of imagination. As the gifted Benjamin F. Taylor wrote of his visit to this wonderland: “Yosemite awaited us without warning. Spectral white in the glancing of the sun, the first thought was that the granite ledges of all the mountains had come to resurrection, and were standing pale and dumb before the Lord. I turned to it again, and began to see the towers, the domes, the spires, the battlements, the arches and the white clouds of solid granite, surging up into the air and come to everlasting anchor until the mountains shall be moved! You hasten on; you hear the winds intoning in the choral galleries a mile above your head; you hear the crash of waters as of cataracts in the sky; you trample upon broad shadows that have fallen thousands of feet down, like the cast-off garments of descending night.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: HALF DOME AND CLOUD’S REST, YOSEMITE VALLEY.—This is equally as grand a view of portions of the Yosemite scenery as the one given on page 177, though perhaps less beautiful from an artistic standard. The half dome on the left is one of the most striking features of this photograph. It is so smooth and regular in its outlines that we can hardly regard it as an accident of nature, but rather a work of design. But, after all, do we not find design, and law, and regularity of purpose in all the works of nature? ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: CAVE ROCK, LAKE TAHOE.] Instead of returning direct to San Francisco, by way of the route we had taken to the Yosemite, we went northward, over a very good road, through Tuolumne and into Calaveras county, near the eastern edge of which is the very celebrated grove of giant trees. The grove is confined within a valley some 3,000 feet long by 800 feet wide, and embraces ninety-three mammoth trees, some of which are prostrate. The tallest now standing is 325 feet high, and measures fifteen feet in diameter. There are others which, though less lofty, exceed the tallest in girth measurement by as much as twenty feet in circumference, while the thickness of the bark on these grizzly giants is as much as eighteen inches. Five miles southeast of the Calaveras forest is the Stanislaus Grove, of about 800 trees, which in any other country than California would be considered as veritable monsters for size; but they do not equal the better specimens in either the Calaveras or Mariposa Groves, though several have a height of 250 feet, and a trunk circumference of thirty feet.