There lies a sweep of emerald grass
turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun,--chrysoprase beautiful
enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John's apocalyptic
heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of
green between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the
westward, widening more and more, it opens into the bosom of great
mountain-ranges,--into a field of perfect light, misty by its own
excess,--into an unspeakable suffusion of glory created from the
phoenix-pile of the dying sun. Here it lies almost as treeless as some
rich old clover-mead; yonder, its luxuriant smooth grasses give way to a
dense wood of cedars, oaks, and pines. Not a living creature, either man
or beast, breaks the visible silence of this inmost paradise; but for
ourselves, standing at the precipice, petrified, as it were, rock on
rock, the great world might well be running back in stone-and-grassy
dreams to the hour when God had given him as yet but two daughters, the
crag and the clover. We were breaking into the sacred closet of Nature's
self-examination. What if, on considering herself, she should of a
sudden, and us-ward unawares, determine to begin the throes of a new
cycle,--spout up remorseful lavas from her long-hardened conscience, and
hurl us all skyward in a hot concrete with her unbosomed sins? Earth
below was as motionless as the ancient heavens above, save for the
shining serpent of the Merced, which silently to our ears threaded the
middle of the grass, and twinkled his burnished back in the sunset
wherever for a space he gilded out of the shadow of woods.
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