The Scenery
Of The Ocean, However Sublime In Vast Expanse, Seems Far Less
Beautiful To Us Dry-Shod Animals Than
That of the land seen only in
comparatively small patches; but when we contemplate the whole globe
as one great
Dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands,
flying through space with other stars all singing and shining
together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of
beauty.
The California coast-hills and cliffs look bare and uninviting as
seen from the ship, the magnificent forests keeping well back out
of sight beyond the reach of the sea winds; those of Oregon and
Washington are in some places clad with conifers nearly down to the
shore; even the little detached islets, so marked a feature to the
northward, are mostly tree-crowned. Up through the Straits of Juan
de Fuca the forests, sheltered from the ocean gales and favored
with abundant rains, flourish in marvelous luxuriance on the
glacier-sculptured mountains of the Olympic Range.
We arrived in Esquimault Harbor, three miles from Victoria, on the
evening of the fourth day, and drove to the town through a
magnificent forest of Douglas spruce, - with an undergrowth in open
spots of oak, madrone, hazel, dogwood, alder, spiraea, willow, and
wild rose, - and around many an upswelling moutonne rock, freshly
glaciated and furred with yellow mosses and lichens.
Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, was in 1879 a small
old-fashioned English town on the south end of Vancouver Island. It
was said to contain about six thousand inhabitants. The government
buildings and some of the business blocks were noticeable, but the
attention of the traveler was more worthily attracted to the neat
cottage homes found here, embowered in the freshest and floweriest
climbing roses and honeysuckles conceivable. Californians may well
be proud of their home roses loading sunny verandas, climbing to
the tops of the roofs and falling over the gables in white and red
cascades. But here, with so much bland fog and dew and gentle laving
rain, a still finer development of some of the commonest garden
plants is reached. English honeysuckle seems to have found here
a most congenial home. Still more beautiful were the wild roses,
blooming in wonderful luxuriance along the woodland paths, with
corollas two and three inches wide. This rose and three species of
spiraea fairly filled the air with fragrance after showers; and how
brightly then did the red dogwood berries shine amid the green leaves
beneath trees two hundred and fifty feet high.
Strange to say, all of this exuberant forest and flower vegetation
was growing upon fresh moraine material scarcely at all moved or in
any way modified by post-glacial agents. In the town gardens and
orchards, peaches and apples fell upon glacier-polished rocks, and
the streets were graded in moraine gravel; and I observed scratched
and grooved rock bosses as unweathered and telling as those of
the High Sierra of California eight thousand feet or more above
sea-level.
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