Which two phrases in the excerpt create a feeling of wonder?
excerpt from Around the World on a Bicycle
by Thomas Stevens
The beauties of nature are scattered with a more lavish hand across the country lying between the summit of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and
the shores where the surf romps and rolls over the golden sands of the Pacific, in Golden Gate Park, than in a journey of the same length in any
other part of the world. Such, at least, is the verdict of many whose fortune it has been to traverse that favored stretch of country. Nothing but
the limited power of man's eyes prevents him from standing on the top of the mountains and surveying, at a glance, the whole glorious
panorama that stretches away for more than two hundred miles to the west, terminating in the gleaming waters of the Pacific Ocean. Could he
do this, he would behold, for the first seventy-five or eighty miles, a vast, billowy sea of foot-hills, clothed with forests of somber pine and bright,
evergreen oaks; and, lower down, dense patches of white-blossomed chaparral, looking in the enchanted distance like irregular banks of snow.
Then the world-renowned valley of the Sacramento River, with its level plains of dark, rich soll, its matchless fields of ripening grain, traversed
here and there by streams that, emerging from the shadowy depths of the foot-hills, wind their way, like gleaming threads of silver, across the
fertile plain and join the Sacramento, which receives them, one and all, in her matronly bosom and hurries with them on to the sea.