The Scenery of California.

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1897
• Subjects: Environmentalist; naturalist; travel; conservation; national parks; John Muir; history; pamphlets; journal articles; speeches; writing; annotation; Arctic; Arctic Ocean
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/230; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmb/article/1229/viewcontent/205.pdf

THE SCENERY OF CALIFORNIA. By John Muir. AT first sight of the fashionable scenery habit, it would seem that the people of the East need not come West seeking fine scenery, for they have plenty of it at home. God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, as long as it is wild; and much in every landscape is unchangeably wild, especially light, which falls everywhere. In no place on all this continent, from Florida to the Arctic Ocean, have I seen finer, diviner, more enchanting landscapes than in the Great American Desert, with its broad, hot, alkaline levels, and mountains and hills rising farther and farther beyond each other in smooth, billowy ranges, robed in light as a garment. And so the lover of nature, wandering at will or remaining steadfast like a rock, is always content with the fullness of beauty about him in any wild place, wherever he may chance to be. Every heaven-born want of scenery is satisfied, and there is no aching void to excite longing or curiosity concerning any other country or star. To the sane and healthy, therefore, it seems hardly worth while to compare the! scenery of the two sides of our continent. Each has its own beauty, like the two sides of 1 a rainbow; but to defrauded toilers, grown dull and blind in duty and business, the need 1 is different. Like sick children who can "'no longer eat bread or recognize their own I mothers, the wearied workers of civilization, weak and giddy in the whirl of cities, stupe- fied by doing good and making money, recreation for body and soul is found only in whatJ is novel. Their own beautiful and enchanting scenery no longer nourishes them. Then- thousand miles of coast, with marvelous wealth of picturesque bays and headlands, kept in perpetual song and bloom of foam and spray by the waves of the blue Atlantic; the charming round-headed trees—oaks and elms, hickory and ilex, tulip and magnolia, fringed with rhododendron and sassafras, stretching in lovely forests along the flowing- folds of the Alleghanies; the spiry ...