The South Lyell glacier eroded this magnificent basin out of solid porphyritic granite while forcing its way westward from the summit fountains toward Yosemite, and the exposed rocks around the shores, and the projecting bosses of the walls, ground and burnished beneath the vast ice-flood, still glow with silvery radiance, notwithstanding the innumerable corroding storms that have fallen upon them.

The river, for miles above and below, consists of a succession of small falls from ten to sixty feet in height, connected by flat, plume-like cascades that go flashing from fall to fall, free and almost channelless, over waving folds of glacier-polished granite.

It is a most beautiful structure of gray granite, and its builders call it their "prayer in stone," which suggests to recollection the story of the cathedral of Amiens, whose architectural construction and arrangement of statuary and paintings made it to be called the Bible of that city.

Low rocky ridges of sandstone gradually approached its banks, and near the camp porphyry, slate, and coarse granite formed detached hills 50 to 100 feet high, seeming to indicate an approach to the ranges in which the stream takes its rise.

All is polished pink granite and marble and bronze.

A wooded amphitheatre, surrounded on three sides by precipitous cliffs of naked granite, sloped gently toward the crest of another precipice that overlooked the valley.

At last the summit is reached, and, disembarking, the tourists can seek refreshments in the hotel, which will cater to their wants, and then spend the time before the train returns in enjoying the view, and in rambling over the seventy acres of broken granite which form the summit.

And the token of its superiority is this, that it builds its new outward life only from the most ancient incorruptible material, out of the eternal granite of Moral Law.

The premises, except on the seaside, were enclosed by a high wall of rough granite.

The traveller is whirled by culverts, abutments, and walls of dressed granite, through cuttings where the earth on either side is carefully paved or turfed to the summit.

Beyond this mountain meadow are great fields of disintegrated granite, broken cubes of pink rock, so vast in extent that they might well be the ruins of all the ancient cities in the world.

This beautiful wall, made of carefully matched ashlars of pure white granite, especially selected for its fine grain, was the work of a master artist.

The six great ashlars of reddish granite weighing fifteen or twenty tons each, and placed in line on the summit of the hill, were brought from a quarry several miles away with an immense amount of labor and pains.

'How he sits, with his hands on his knees, the enormous size of his limbs quite concealed by the careless grace, with his Egyptian face, like some dumb granite Memnon!' 'Only waiting,' said Lancelot, 'for the day-star to arise on him and awake him into voice.'

He had wandered all but harmless about the West country that summer; as if his maw had been full glutted five years before, when he sat for many a week upon the Dartmoor hills, amid the dull brown haze, and sun-burnt bents, and dried-up watercourses of white dusty granite, looking far and wide over the plague-struck land, and listening to the dead-bell booming all day long in Tavistock churchyard.

At nine miles we met with a stream 100 yards wide coming from the south-east, evidently tributary to the Strelley, and taking its rise in elevated granite ranges with black volcanic ridges protruding through them, but not to any considerable height above the general level of the country.

This stands towering out in lonely sublimity, like the everlasting granite of the Alps or the Himalaya, as compared with the changing alluvium of the Nile or the Ganges.

Your presence is absolutely no more to any soul of them, provided they have souls, than if you were so much perfectly familiar granite.

Left the bivouac at 7.35 a.m. steering 312 degrees; passed over a nearly level country timbered with cypress and eucalyptus, with patches of acacia thicket; at 2.45 p.m. halted at a deep waterhole in a flat granite rock.

Beneath the trees were the ruins of an Inca temple, flanking and partly enclosing the gigantic granite boulder, one end of which overhung a small pool of running water.

Nor need the graven granite stone, To tell of garlands all thine own To hold a soldier's name!

And on top of Jenkins rested a granite crosssufficiently handsome, to be sure, for a solicitor, but nothing out of the way.

Fancy every house in Broadway a store, all built of light granite, the Park stripped of all its trees and paved with granite, and a lofty column in the centre, double the crowd and the tumult of business, and you will have some idea of the view.

Arriving at the limit of timber and of vegetation, we tied our horses, and then commenced the ascent of the steepest part of the mountain, over the broken granite, great care being necessary to avoid sliding down the mountain side with the loose granite.

Hearing us speak of mosaic granite, a rock occurring in Woodbridge, to which we had given this name, from the checker-like arrangement of its felspathic ingredient, he concluded that we attributed its formation to the era of Moses, and asked Percival what evidence he had for such an opinion.