III

Going from the Grand Canon to Yosemite is going from one sublimity to another of a different order.  The canon is the more strange, unearthly, apocryphal, appeals more to the imagination, and is the more overwhelming in its size, its wealth of color, and its multitude of suggestive forms.  But for quiet majesty and beauty, with a touch of the sylvan and pastoral, too, Yosemite stands alone.  One could live with Yosemite, camp in it, tramp in it, winter and summer in it, and find nature in her tender and human, almost domestic moods, as well as in her grand and austere.  But I do not think one could ever feel at home in or near the Grand Canon; it is too unlike anything we have ever known upon the earth; it is like a vision of some strange colossal city uncovered from the depth of geologic time.  You may have come to it, as we did, from the Petrified Forests, where you saw the silicified trunks of thousands of gigantic trees or tree ferns, that grew millions of years ago, most of them uncovered, but many of them protruding from banks of clay and gravel, and in their interiors rich in all the colors of the rainbow, and you wonder if you may not now be gazing upon some petrified antediluvian city of temples and holy places exhumed by mysterious hands and opened up to the vulgar gaze of to-day.  You look into it from above and from another world and you descend into it at your peril.  Yosemite you enter as into a gigantic hall and make your own; the canon you gaze down upon, and are an alien, whether you enter it or not.  Yosemite is carved out of the most majestic and enduring of all rocks, granite; the Grand Canon is carved out of one of the most beautiful, but perishable, red Carboniferous sandstone and limestone.  There is a maze of beautiful and intricate lines in the latter, a wilderness of temple-like forms and monumental remains, and noble architectural profiles that delight while they bewilder the eye.  Yosemite has much greater simplicity, and is much nearer the classic standard of beauty.  Its grand and austere features predominate, of course, but underneath these and adorning them are many touches of the idyllic and the picturesque.  Its many waterfalls fluttering like white lace against its vertical granite walls, its smooth, level floor, its noble pines and oaks, its open glades, its sheltering groves, its bright, clear, winding river, its soft voice of many waters, its flowers, its birds, its grass, its verdure, even its orchards of blooming apple trees, all inclosed in this tremendous granite frame—­what an unforgettable picture it all makes, what a blending of the sublime and the homelike and familiar it all is!  It is the waterfalls that make the granite alive, and bursting into bloom as it were.  What a touch they give! how they enliven the scene!  What music they evoke from these harps of stone!