NEAR SEAL ROCK.
This is as true of the Mariposa big tree region as of the valley. Indeed, more care is needed for the trees than for the great chasm, for man cannot permanently injure the distinctive features of the latter, while the destruction of the sequoias will be an irreparable loss to the State and to the world. The Sequoia gigantea differs in leaf, and size and shape of cone, from the great Sequoia semper virens on the coast near Santa Cruz; neither can be spared. The Mariposa trees, scattered along on a mountain ridge 6500 feet above the sea, do not easily obtain their victory, for they are a part of a magnificent forest of other growths, among which the noble sugar-pine is conspicuous for its enormous size and graceful vigor. The sequoias dominate among splendid rivals only by a magnitude that has no comparison elsewhere in the world. I think no one can anticipate the effect that one of these monarchs will have upon him. He has read that a coach and six can drive through one of the trees that is standing; that another is thirty-three feet in diameter, and that its vast stem, 350 feet high, is crowned with a mass of foliage that seems to brush against the sky. He might be prepared for a tower 100 feet in circumference, and even 400 feet high, standing upon a level plain; but this living growth is quite another affair. Each tree is an individual, and has a personal character. No man can stand in the presence of one of these giants without a new sense of the age of the world and the insignificant span of one human life; but he is also overpowered by a sense of some gigantic personality. It does not relieve him to think of this as the Methuselah of trees, or to call it by the name of some great poet or captain. The awe the tree inspires is of itself. As one lies and looks up at the enormous bulk, it seems not so much the bulk, so lightly is it carried, as the spirit of the tree—the elastic vigor, the patience, the endurance of storm and change, the confident might, and the soaring, almost contemptuous pride, that overwhelm the puny spectator. It is just because man can measure himself, his littleness, his brevity of existence, with this growth out of the earth, that he is more personally impressed by it than he might be by the mere variation in the contour of the globe which is called a mountain. The imagination makes a plausible effort to comprehend it, and is foiled. No; clearly it is not mere size that impresses one; it is the dignity, the character in the tree, the authority and power of antiquity. Side by side of these venerable forms are young sequoias, great trees themselves, that have only just begun their millennial career—trees that will, if spared, perpetuate to remote ages this race of giants, and in two to four thousand years from now take the place of their great-grandfathers, who are sinking under the weight of years, and one by one measuring their length on the earth.
LAGUNA, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.
The transition from the sublime to the exquisitely lovely in nature can nowhere else be made with more celerity than from the Sierras to the coast at Monterey; California abounds in such contrasts and surprises. After the great stirring of the emotions by the Yosemite and the Mariposa, the Hotel del Monte Park and vicinity offer repose, and make an appeal to the sense of beauty and refinement. Yet even here something unique is again encountered. I do not refer to the extraordinary beauty of the giant live-oaks and the landscape-gardening about the hotel, which have made Monterey famous the world over, but to the sea-beach drive of sixteen miles, which can scarcely be rivalled elsewhere either for marine loveliness or variety of coast scenery. It has points like the ocean drive at Newport, but is altogether on a grander scale, and shows a more poetic union of shore and sea; besides, it offers the curious and fascinating spectacles of the rocks inhabited by the sea-lions, and the Cypress Point. These huge, uncouth creatures can be seen elsewhere, but probably nowhere else on this coast are they massed in greater numbers. The trees of Cypress Point are unique, this species of cypress having been found nowhere else. The long, never-ceasing swell of the Pacific incessantly flows up the many crescent sand beaches, casting up shells of brilliant hues, sea-weed, and kelp, which seems instinct with animal life, and flotsam from the far-off islands. But the rocks that lie off the shore, and the jagged points that project in fanciful forms, break the even great swell, and send the waters, churned into spray and foam, into the air with a thousand hues in the sun. The shock of these sharp collisions mingles with the heavy ocean boom. Cypress Point is one of the most conspicuous of these projections, and its strange trees creep out upon the ragged ledges almost to the water's edge. These cypresses are quite as instinct with individual life and quite as fantastic as any that Doré drew for his "Inferno." They are as gnarled and twisted as olive-trees two centuries old, but their attitudes seem not only to show struggle with the elements, but agony in that struggle. The agony may be that of torture in the tempest, or of some fabled creatures fleeing and pursued, stretching out their long arms in terror, and fixed in that writhing fear. They are creatures of the sea quite as much as of the land, and they give to this lovely coast a strange charm and fascination.