At the first leap it clears fourteen hundred and ninety-seven feet; then it tumbles down a series of steep stairways four hundred and two feet, and then makes a jump to the meadows five hundred and eighteen feet more.  But it is the upper and highest cataract that is most wonderful to the eye, as well as most musical.  The cliff is so sheer that there is no break in the body of the water during the whole of its descent of more than a quarter of a mile.  It pours in a curve from the summit, fifteen hundred feet, to the basin that hoards it but a moment for the cascades that follow.

And what endless complexities and opulence of beauty in the forms and motions of the cataract!  It is comparatively narrow at the top of the precipice, although, as we said, the tide that pours over is thirty-five feet broad.  But it widens as it descends, and curves a little on one side as it widens, so that it shapes itself, before it reaches its first bowl of granite, into the figure of a comet.  More beautiful than the comet, however, we can see the substance of this watery loveliness ever renew itself and ever pour itself away.

  “It mounts in spray the skies, and thence again
    Returns in an unceasing shower, which round
  With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain,
    Is an eternal April to the ground,
    Making it all one emerald;—­how profound
  The gulf! and how the giant element
    From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,
  Crushing the cliffs.”

The cataract seems to shoot out a thousand serpentine heads or knots of water, which wriggle down deliberately through the air and expend themselves in mist before half the descent is over.  Then a new set burst from the body and sides of the fall, with the same fortune on the remaining distance; and thus the most charming fretwork of watery nodules, each trailing its vapory train for a hundred feet or more, is woven all over the cascade, which swings, now and then, thirty feet each way, on the mountain side, as if it were a pendulum of watery lace.  Once in a while, too, the wind manages to get back of the fall, between it and the cliff, and then it will whirl it round and round for two or three hundred feet, as if to try the experiment of twisting it to wring it dry.

Of course I visited the foot of the lowest fall of the Yosemite, and looked up through the spray, five hundred feet, to its crown.  And I tried to climb to the base of the first or highest cataract, but lost my way among the steep, sharp rocks, for there is only one line by which the cliff can be scaled.  But no nearer view that I found or heard described, is comparable with the picture, from the hotel, of the comet curve of the upper cataract, fifteen hundred feet high, and the two falls immediately beneath it, in which the same water leaps to the level of the quiet Merced.

CXXV.  A PSALM OF LIFE. (429)