Letter from C[harles] W[alter] Carruth to John Muir, 1894 Oct 30.

• Main Author: Carruth, Charles Walter
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1894
• Subjects: Environmentalist; naturalist; travel; conservation; national parks; John Muir; history; correspondence; letters; Glacier Bay; Mont Blanc; glacier; glaciers; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/muir-correspondence/6906; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/muir-correspondence/article/8257/viewcontent/muir08_0471.pdf

[1][letterhead]Oct. 30 1894Dear Mr. Muir:I am very glad to see that your book is out at last. Congratulate you upon the appearance of your first independent volume. Wish it were the last of a dozen, as it should be. It is too bad that so much splendid literary material as you have accumulated should be entirely unpublished or in unavailable back volumes of newspapers, etc. I trust that the demand for this volume will lead to the publishing01864 [2]of your Alaska letters. Nearly all of the material in this volume was familiar to me, but I am delighted to hear it in a form where I can nibble at it daily. The illustrations seem to me to be hardly up to the Century standard, and unworthy of the subject matter.Your water ouzel made me think of Emerson's "Titmouse" was it?Here was this atom in full breathHurling defiance at vast death"I enclose a wishy-washy review of the book from the Enquirer. Wish that I had the ability to do the work and the entree to the columns of a standard publication. I think that I would impress upon the public mind that a real classic had been placed before them. I wish that Stedman[3][letterhead]might review it in the Century. He is a critic who is not afraid to show his enthusiasm when he finds something worhty of arousing it.I was interested in reading an account of Le Conte's lecture on Glaciers, and was surprised to find that the scientists have only within quite recent years discovered that they were "alive." The poets knew it long ago. Byron, in "Manfred" (written early in the century) made the Spirit of Mont Blanc say:"The glacier's cold and restless massMoves onward day by day.But I am he who bids it pass,Or with its ice delay."01864 [4]Shelley in "Prometheus Unbound" written about the same time, makes Prometheus say:"The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spearsOf their moon-freezing crystals."These two instances came to my mind, and possibly if one had time more references might be found.By the way, I have written a sonnet upon "Glacier Bay," and since writing it I find a ...