[Illustration: IN THE COURT OF THE GIANTS MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by H. S. Hoyt] The _Sequoia sempervirens_ is one of the most consummately beautiful of trees. Its beauty is as rare and undefinable as the blue on the mountains in the hour of twilight, as startling and lovely as a flower-clad April, as charming and delightful as the notes of a melody that the winds bear away. And yet beauty is its least perfection. All the cheerful gayety, the contented peacefulness, the warm companionship that are the chief glory of other trees, the Redwood, too, possesses. It is one of the most lovable and friendly of trees. But there is nothing rough or common about it, nothing coarse or voluptuous. To know it is to know something that is genuine. To admire it is to be unable to look upon it with the cold eye of a judge, but with the reverence of a worshipper and the veneration of a child. The _Sequoia gigantea_ is formidable and sombre in aspect and very often terrible to look upon. Impassive, unapproachable, uncommunicative, it is the very autocrat of the forest. Godlike in physiognomy, at times it is impossible to understand. It has a loftiness of port, a dignity of bearing, a sublimity of energy that command attention and win their way insensibly into the soul. Its nature is as hard and flinty as the granite of the mountainside. But in spite of all this highmightiness there is something forlorn and pathetic, something sad and benign about it. All who know the pathos in memories of days that are accomplished and faces that have vanished will realize how replete this tree is with sadness and tenderness. Grand though it is in the religious solemnity and silence that rest upon it there is something pathetic about its very loneliness that resembles sadness as mist resembles the rain. Assuredly, if the _Sequoia sempervirens_ is the most lively and cheerful of trees, the _Sequoia gigantea_ is the saddest and the grandest.