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Show 57, MOUNTAIN JOY He had never seen a landscape like the Sierra before that day when he peered over a ridge and saw Bridalveil Falls. He was not prepared for the sublimity of the rocks and waters of Yosemite. When he looked down at Bridalveil from a distance, he thought he was observing a "dainty little fall," certainly not higher than sixty or seventy feet high. When he actually began to appreciate the magnitude of Yosemite, he was overpowered by its grandeur. "Oh, no, not for me," he later remembered thinking. This is what sublimity has always meant, I suppose. Sublime Nature forces a man to reevaluate not just what he sees, but what he is and what he is capable of understanding. I doubt that any new visitor to Yosemite can adjust himself quickly enough to the reality he finds. Either he dismisses the features with a quick glance, or else he is overcome. In many ways the shock may be more extreme for the modern traveller who comes bursting out of the tunnel at fifty miles an hour, glides past Bridalveil before he even smells the ferns and mosses, and finds himself under the immense face of El Capitan. But Muir was not a man to let first impressions determine his attitude toward a landscape. As Yosemite grew in him, the first lesson he had to learn was the necessity of adjusting his own senses, so that he might be able to read a landscape which was written in such massive characters. |