The Yosemite valley, in California, is a pass about ten miles long.  At its eastern extremity it leads into three narrower passes, each of which extends several miles, winding by the wildest paths into the heart of the Sierra Nevada chain of mountains.  For seven miles of the main valley, which varies in width from three quarters of a mile to a mile and a half, the walls on either side are from two thousand to nearly five thousand feet above the road, and are nearly perpendicular.  From these walls, rocky splinters a thousand feet in height start up, and every winter drop a few hundred tons of granite, to adorn the base of the rampart with picturesque ruin.

The valley is of such irregular width, and bends so much and often so abruptly, that there is a great variety and frequent surprise in the forms and combinations of the overhanging rocks as one rides along the bank of the stream.  The patches of luxuriant meadow, with their dazzling green, and the grouping of the superb firs, two hundred feet high, that skirt them, and that shoot above the stout and graceful oaks and sycamores through which the horse path winds, are delightful rests of sweetness and beauty amid the threatening awfulness.

The Merced, which flows through the same pass, is a noble stream, a hundred feet wide and ten feet deep.  It is formed chiefly of the streams that leap and rush through the narrower passes, and it is swollen, also, by the bounty of the marvelous waterfalls that pour down from the ramparts of the wider valley.  The sublime poetry of Habakkuk is needed to describe the impression, and, perhaps, the geology, of these mighty fissures:  “Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers.”

At the foot of the breakneck declivity of nearly three thousand feet by which we reach the banks of the Merced, we are six miles from the hotel, and every rod of the ride awakens wonder, awe, and a solemn joy.  As we approach the hotel, and turn toward the opposite bank of the river, what is that

    “Which ever sounds and shines,
    A pillar of white light upon the wall
    Of purple cliffs aloof descried”?

That, reader, is the highest waterfall in the world—­the Yosemite cataract, nearly twenty-five hundred feet in its plunge, dashing from a break or depression in a cliff thirty-two hundred feet sheer.

A writer who visited this valley in September, calls the cataract a mere tape line of water dropped from the sky.  Perhaps it is so, toward the close of the dry season; but as we saw it, the blended majesty and beauty of it, apart from the general sublimities of Yosemite gorge, would repay a journey of a thousand miles.  There was no deficiency of water.  It was a powerful stream, thirty-five feet broad, fresh from the Nevada, that made the plunge from the brow of the awful precipice.