HALF-HOURS WITH THE BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. THE YOSEMITE VALLEY. FITZHUGH LUDLOW. [The minutely-detailed and poetically-conceived description of the famous Yosemite Valley given below is from "The Heart of the Continent," an eloquently-written narrative of travel in the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific States, by Fitzhugh Ludlow. His other works are "The Hasheesh-Eater," "The Opium Habit," and "Little Brother." The visions described in "The Hasheesh-Eater" are brilliantly delineated, and seem rather the work of an ardent imagination than actual happenings. Mr. Ludlow was born at Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1837. He died in Switzerland, in 1870, a victim of opium-eating. He wrote a number of very popular student songs.] IMMEDIATELY after leaving the meadow where we dined, we plunged again into the thick forest, where every now and then some splendid grouse or the beautiful plumecrowned California quail went whirring away from before our horses. Here and there a broad grizzly "sign" intersected our trail. The tall purple deer-weed, a magnificent scarlet flower of name unknown to me, and another blossom like the laburnum, endlessly varied in its shades of roseate, blue, or the compromised tints, made the hill-sides 7 gorgeous beyond human gardening. All these were scentless; but one other flower, much rarer, made fragrance enough for all. This was the "Lady Washington," and much resembled a snowy day-lily with an odor of tubeOur dense leafy surrounding hid us from the fact of our approach to the Valley's tremendous battlement, till our trail turned at a sharp angle, and we stood on "Inspiration Point." roses. That name had appeared pedantic, but we found it only the spontaneous expression of our own feelings on the spot. We did not so much seem to be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe, as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just been breathed. I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for an abridged translation of any Scripture of Nature. We stood on the verge of a precipice more than three thousand feet in height,-a sheer granite wall, whose terrible perpendicular distance baffled all visual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazy green spiculæ,-they might be tender spears of grass catching the slant sun on upheld aprons of cobweb, or giant pines whose tops that sun first gilt before he made gold of all the Valley. There faced us another wall like our own. How far off it might be we could only guess. When Nature's lightning hits a man fair and square, it splits his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, mathematicians have ascertained the width of the Valley to vary between half a mile and five miles. Where we stood, the width is about two. I said a wall like our own; but as yet we could not know that certainly, for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spell-bound to the tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh,-broadly burning, rather than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From that sun, clear back to the first avant-courier trace of purple twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim,—yes, as if it were the very butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven, ran that wall, always sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel might climb or sparrow fly,-so broad that it was just faint-lined like the paper on which I write by the loftiest water-fall in the world,-so lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge seemed like mere lashes on the granite lid of the Great Valley's upgazing eye. In the first astonishment of the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, and seemed to see an unbroken sky-line; but as ecstasy gave way to examination, we discovered how greatly some portions of the precipice surpassed our immediate vis-à-vis in height. First, a little east of our off-look, there projected boldly into the Valley from the dominant line of the base a square stupendous tower that might have been hewn by the diamond adzes of the Genii for a second Babel experiment, in expectance of the wrath of Allah. Here and there the tools had left a faint scratch, only deep as the width of Broadway and a bagatelle of five hundred feet in length; but that detracted no more from the unblemished foursquare contour of the entire mass than a pin-mark from the symmetry of a door-post. A city might have been built on its grand flat top. And, oh, the gorgeous masses of light and shadow which the falling sun cast on it,—the shadows like great waves, the lights like their spumy tops and flying mist, thrown up from the heaving breast of a golden sea! In California, at this season, the dome of heaven is cloudless; but I still dream of what must be |