The Grizzly Giant is among the first born of the living things of the earth. It bears greater evidence of extreme age than any other living Sequoia of the Mariposa Grove and may be of a former generation. The companions of its youth are dead and buried in their graves of leaf mold and it seems to have been nearing its prime when the other lofty monarchs of today were unknown. Grand and unconquerable, mightiest of the mighty lords of the forest, it stands like an agonized Sampson of the woods, blind and lost, with a hundred great arms groping and reaching out. Like all Nature’s works of power, it seeks to express more than it can convey. Homeric in its gravity, marble in its impassiveness, and majestic in its tranquility, it is unapproachable among things that live. Aspiring toward the clouds and on speaking terms only with the heavens, its equanimity seems unruffled by storm or tempest; its sweet serenity unsullied by anger, hatred or other passions unworthy of an immortal nature. For a thousand years the earliest rays of dawn have gilded it. For ten centuries departing day has lingered and played on its summit. Surely the mellow notes of the hermit thrush issuing forth from such loftiness sound more angelic there than elsewhere. Joseph Le Conte left posterity an indelible picture of this tree. “Of all the trees of the Grove, and, therefore, of all trees I have ever seen, the Grizzly Giant impressed me the most profoundly; not, indeed, by its tallness or its symmetry, but by the hugeness of its cylindrical trunk, and by a certain gnarled grandeur, a fibrous, sinewy strength which defies time itself. The others with their smooth, straight, tapering shafts towering to a height of over two hundred feet seemed to me the type of youthful vigor and beauty in the plentitude of power and success. But _this_, with its large, rough, battered trunk nearly thirty feet in diameter—with top broken off at a height of two hundred and four feet, with its great limbs six to eight feet in diameter, twisted and broken—seemed to me the type of a great life, declining but still strong and self-reliant. Perhaps my own top with its departing foliage made me sympathize with this grizzled giant; but I found the others, too, standing with hats in hand and gazing in silent, bare-headed reverence upon this grand old tree.”