The first leap of Yosemite Falls is sixteen hundred feet—­sixteen hundred feet of a compact mass of snowy rockets shooting downward and bursting into spray around which rainbows flit and hover.  The next leap is four hundred feet, and the last six hundred.  We tried to get near the foot and inspect the hidden recess in which this airy spirit again took on a more tangible form of still, running water, but the spray over a large area fell like a summer shower, drenching the trees and the rocks, and holding the inquisitive tourist off at a safe distance.  We had to beat a retreat with dripping garments before we had got within fifty yards of the foot of the fall.  At first I was surprised at the volume of water that came hurrying out of the hidden recess of dripping rocks and trees—­a swiftly flowing stream, thirty or forty feet wide, and four or five feet deep.  How could that comparatively narrow curtain of white spray up there give birth to such a full robust stream?  But I saw that in making the tremendous leap from the top of the precipice, the stream was suddenly drawn out, as we stretch a rubber band in our hands, and that the solid and massive current below was like the rubber again relaxed.  The strain was over, and the united waters deepened and slowed up over their rocky bed.

Yosemite for a home or a camp, the Grand Canon for a spectacle.  I have spoken of the robin I saw in Yosemite Valley.  Think how forlorn and out of place a robin would seem in the Grand Canon!  What would he do there?  There is no turf for him to inspect, and there are no trees for him to perch on.  I should as soon expect to find him amid the pyramids of Egypt, or amid the ruins of Karnak.  The bluebird was in the Yosemite also, and the water-ouzel haunted the lucid waters.

I noticed a peculiarity of the oak in Yosemite that I never saw elsewhere [Footnote:  I have since observed the same trait in the oaks in Georgia—­probably a characteristic of this tree in southern latitudes.]—­a fluid or outflowing condition of the growth aboveground, such as one usually sees in the roots of trees—­so that it tended to envelop and swallow, as it were, any solid object with which it came in contact.  If its trunk touched a point of rock, it would put out great oaken lips several inches in extent as if to draw the rock into its maw.  If a dry limb was cut or broken off, a foot from the trunk, these thin oaken lips would slowly creep out and envelop it—­a sort of Western omnivorous trait appearing in the trees.

Whitman refers to “the slumbering and liquid trees.”  These Yosemite oaks recall his expression more surely than any of our Eastern trees.

The reader may create for himself a good image of Yosemite by thinking of a section of seven or eight miles of the Hudson River, midway of its course, as emptied of its water and deepened three thousand feet or more, having the sides nearly vertical, with snow-white waterfalls fluttering against them here and there, the famous spires and domes planted along the rim, and the landscape of groves and glades, with its still, clear winding river, occupying the bottom.