[Excerpts from Letters to Mrs. Jeanne Carr.]
JOHN MUIR JOHN MUIR: GEOLOGIST, EXPLORER, NATURALIST And Nature, the old nurse, took The child upon her knee, Saying: "Here is a story-book Thy Father has written for thee." "Come wander with me" she said, Into regions yet untrod; And read what is still unread In the manuscripts...
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Scholarly Commons
1905
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| Online Access: | https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/289 https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1288&context=jmb |
| Summary: | JOHN MUIR JOHN MUIR: GEOLOGIST, EXPLORER, NATURALIST And Nature, the old nurse, took The child upon her knee, Saying: "Here is a story-book Thy Father has written for thee." "Come wander with me" she said, Into regions yet untrod; And read what is still unread In the manuscripts of God." And he wandered away and away With Nature, the dear old nurse, Who sang to him night and day The rhymes of the universe. And whenever the way seemed long, Or his heart began to fail, She would sing a more wonderful song, Ov tell a more marvelous tale. ]HE words so long ago applied by Longfellow to the elder Agassiz, have an equal descriptive power when attached "'to the lonely student of the American glaciers. They are, perhaps, even truer of the Scotch-American, than of the Swiss, since the latter, although a pioneer in his chosen path of scientific progress, lived in direct and constant intercourse with a large body of co-workers and students, in an atmosphere of high culture; while the former, more than once, has vanished for years together, into the wilderness, reappearing on the margins of society, coming into sight upon farms, in mills and in factories, only when his wants have compelled him. The result of these lonely labors has been twofold for the country and for the world: first, the acquisition of extensive knowledge regarding the effects of the glacial period; second, the establishment, through the influence of his writings, of'national reservations and parks, in which our American flora and fauna may pursue their lives unmolested. Either side of the result would have been a life-work, the parallel of which is accomplished by a handful of persons in a whole generation; while the union of the two distinct divisions of the attainment assures for Mr. Muir the recognition of scientists, together with the warmer gratitude of the people to whose instruction and pleasure he has so richly contributed. His work demanding the most intelligent and trained powers of observation, coupled with heroic courage, patience and self-abnegation, has been done with a quietness and modesty all unconscious of requirement, exaction, or hardship, and with an enthusiasm which claims no exterior reward. The writings of this faithful, passionate lover of Nature have a quality of interest and charm almost beyond description. His words, until they are examined critically, pass unnoticed, since they are a transparent medium for the transmission of thought. The ideas, in 37 JOHN MUIR the first force of conception, seize the reader, who is swept onward, as through a constantly changing panorama of real scenery and amid the" most varied and emphatic forms of animal life. But enchanting as these writings are, their chief value lies in the fact that they offer a record of observation and experiment; that they are a solid contribution to scientific literature whose accuracy can not be assailed. The work of Mr. Muir stands much above his words, and it will be accepted as his most valid claim to the lasting gratitude of the world. This is as he would wish it to be, since his attitude toward the more passive forms of intellectual labor was well defined in his refusal to prepare himself for teaching his science: replying repeatedly to the alluring inducements offered him, by saying simply that he wanted to be more than a professor, whether noticed by the world or not; that there were already too many instructors as compared with the students in the field. With the same restraint he has confined his public utterances to two volumes and perhaps one hundred fifty comparatively short articles, the latter of which he has contributed through a period of three decades to the current literature of the country; the first one appearing in the New York Tribune during the year 1871, while his first book, "The Mountains of California" was delayed until 1894. Of this a competent critic wrote that "it should take high rank among the productions of American naturalists by reason of the information which it contains* and yet it reads like a romance." It were better to say that this book, like all other writings of its author, "reads itself"; that it quickens the pulse and enlivens the imagination of the one who follows its story, not with the fevered heat generated by fiction, but with a glow of mental enthusiasm akin to the physical sensation produced by the ascent into rarified air. The work and the writings of the man constitute his best portrait and biography. , The bare facts of life—birth, early education and preliminary effort—are, in this case, as in all distinguished careers, of small importance, except as they are plainly the cause of success, and as such interesting and instructive. Otherwise, if recorded, they form a kind of literary gossip which it is unjustifiable, or at least idle to propagate. In the personal history of John Muir there occur a number of these effect-producing facts from which have flowed the streams of 63g *!# I . JOHN MUIR his activity. Such, for instance, were his Scotch birth and the severe training in several languages which, begun in early childhood, in the Mother Country, gave him the industry and the persistence with which to pursue his lonely studies in the forests of the New World. The acquisition needed the opportunity to be developed, which came in the disguise of a hardship and of parental restraint of long duration since, at the age of eleven, taken by his family to Wisconsin, at a period (1849), when life in that State could not be other than that of pioneers and colonists, he struggled against the forces of Nature for bare existence, under circumstances familiar to all readers of the romantic, legendary history of the West, which never fails to recall the Labors of Hercules: that cycle of fables which epitomizes the story of civilization in the adventures of a hero and demi-god. The life of the boy and youth, John Muir—for these conditions prevailed for eleven years—was made difficult to the limit of endurance by the refusal of his father to allow him any but very early morning hours in which to pursue his studies. He thus records experiences from which those conscious of power may draw courage and inspiration for the death-combat against adversity. "It was winter" he writes, "and a boy sleeps soundly after chopping and fence-building all day in frosty air and snow. Therefore, I feared that I should not be able to take any advantage of the granted permission. For I was always asleep at six o'clock, when my father called. The early-rising machine was not then made, and there was no one to awaken me. Going to bed wondering whether I could compel myself to awaken before the regular hours, and determined to try, I was delighted, next morning, to find myself called by will, the power of which over sleep I then discovered. Throwing myself out of bed and lighting a candle, eager to learn how much time had been gained, I found that it was only one o'clock; leaving five hours before the work of the farm began. At this same hour, all winter long, my will, like a good angel, awakened me, and never did time seem more gloriously precious and rich. Fire was not allowed; so, to escape the frost, I went down into the cellar, and there read some favorite book—the Bible, 'Pilgrim's Progress,' Shakspere, Plutarch's Lives, Milton, Burns, Walter Scott—or I worked out some invention that haunted me." Thus closely set round with the hardest physical limitations, the JOHN MUIR boy was furthermore open to the censure of his parent. Deeply interested in Scott, as was inevitable in one of his traditions, temperament and talents, he was constantly confronted by the fact that "Feyther did na believe in a laddie's readin' novels." And again, having carved from wood the most ingenious clocks fitted with automatic attachments for lighting the lamps and fires, he was reprimanded sharply for wasting his time upon "sic-like fol-der-rols"; while he feared even that "Feyther might deem it his duty to burn them." Thus up to the age when the ordinary boy is about to leave college, this youth of the wilderness worked in solitude: missing the companionship which forms and polishes the man of the world; which fits the individual to fence, to thrust and parry with such invisible arms as are necessary to success in professional, social, and business life. But compensation for this loss was not wanting. The lonely boy escaped the routine which a hard and fast system always entails. He studied things in and for themselves, and was carried from attainment to attainment by pure enthusiasm for his subjects. He was hampered by no set tasks and feared no examinations. Through stress of circumstances, he gained the best, the only, preparation for a career of individual and most difficult scientific investigation in which self-reliance and judgment, as well as knowledge, were among the principal factors of success. At the age of twenty-two, as a consequence of a visit to the State Fair at Madison, undertaken in order to sell specimens of his wooden clocks and other devices, he entered the University in that town; choosing to devote himself to mathematics, geology, chemistry and botany, and casting aside from the beginning all expectations of a diploma. This action which, to-day, would have no special significance, was, in i860, a proof of strong individuality and practical sense; since a single curriculum leading to a single degree was prescribed to all students, and even Harvard, the pioneer in college progress, was yet far from offering elective courses. During Mr. Muir's studies at Madison there entered into his life the influence which is so often found working miracles in the early part of thecareers of men destined to become famous: a guiding force, gentle, judicious and strong, which can proceed only from the sympathy, experience and protecting instinct of an elder and cultured woman. Isolation, the rude contact or the indifference of the world, poverty and hardship can often be forgotten, if only this influence be 640 r" VERNAL FALLS "It is April. The falls respond gloriously to the ripe sunshine of these days. So do the flowers. I have written a song but dare not tell anyone as yet. I never can keep my pen perfectly sober when it gets into the bounce and hurrah of these falls, but it never has broken into rhyme before." John Mulr. Photograph by W. E. Dassonville, San Francisco JOHN MUIR WSBM •* ir ^Pf^S^JSBSBSSBfl? THE HALF DOME FROM CLOUD'S REST TRAIL "The granite domes and pavement, apparently imperishable, we take as symbols of permanence, while these crumbling peaks, down whose frosty gullies avalanches are ever falling, are symbols of change and decay. Yet all alike, fast or slow, are surely vanishing away. Nature is ever 3t work huilding and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest, but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.'' John Muir. Photograph by \V. E. Dassonville, San Francisco -*.* i i present to sustain, as we recognize it to have been during the formative period of the man and scientist with whom we are dealing. The wife of a professor at the University of Wisconsin encouraged and inspired the struggling student; urging him to experiment, investigate, explore, until he developed into his strong maturity. Then, according to the law of such cases, ceasing to be the inspiring cause of action, she became the confidant, the one friend who lent the willing ear, the attentive mind to the story of project and success, of the discoverer's exultation and of the hero's daring. Therefore, while the honor which attaches to the self-made man, can not be taken away from Mr. Muir, the gift of his personality and accomplishments to the Nation and the world is jointly due to himself, as. the active, and the kindly enlightened woman, as the passive agent; each force being absolutely necessary to the other. . -.' A vista into a long period of doubt and probation is opened by a letter written by Mr. Muir at the age of twenty-seven. FroVn this a quotation will be effective, since it offers a contrast with the quiet, assured current of thought running joyously through the writings of the same man after the attainment of signal success. While yet the chief path of his life lay unmarked before him, he expressed himself: "A life-time is so little a time that we die before we get ready to live. I should like to study at a college, but then I have to say to myself: 'You will die before you can do anything else.' I should like to study medicine that I might do my part in lessening human misery; but again it comes: 'You will die before you are ready, or able to do so.' How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt I But again the chilling answer is reiterated: 'Could we live a million of years, then how delightful to spend in perfect contentment so many thousand years in quiet study in college, so many amid the grateful din of machines, so many amid human pain, so many thousands in the sweet study of Nature, among the dingles and dells of Scotland, and all the other less important parts of our world.' Then, perhaps, we might, with at least a show of reason, 'shuffle off this mortal coil,' and look back upon our star with something of satisfaction . .'In our higher state of existence, we shall have time and intellect for study. .Eternity, with per~ haps the whole unlimited creation of God as our field, should satisfy us, and maks-us patient and trustful; while we pray with the Psalmist: 'Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto 43 JOHN MUIR wisdom'. . . .What you say respecting the littleness of the number who are called to the pure and deep commission of the beautiful all- loving Nature is particularly true of the hard-working people with whom I now dwell. In vain is the glorious chart of God in Nature spread out for them. 'So many acres chopped' is their motto. And they grub away amid the smoke of magnificent forest trees, black as demons and material as the soil they move upon. . . .In my long rambles, last summer, I did not find a single person who knew anything of botany, and but few who knew the meaning of the word; and wherein lay the charm which could conduct a man who might as well be gathering mammon, so many miles through these fastnesses to suffer hunger and exhaustion, was with them never to be discovered." This melancholy view of life held by the young man was, a year later, changed to poignant grief by an accident whose results threatened the loss of his right eye. Then, yielding to his strongest im- pluse—the love of Nature—he subordinated to it the necessity of earning his bread. His sight seemed chiefly dear and valuable to him because it permitted him to enjoy the beauty of the external world, and his sorrow condensed into the single cry: "The sunshine and winds are working in all the gardens of God, but I, I am lost. I am shut in darkness." But again, as in the case of his early hardships and solitude, the accident and a subsequent malarial fever were but the workings of destiny which slowly drew him to the place of his real labors. Scarcely recovered from his accident, he undertook a thousand mile tramp to Florida, sleeping for the most part in the open, from preference, as well as for reasons of economy. Weary, fasting and footsore, he never lost enthusiasm, and at the end of a fatiguing stage of his journey he wrote: "I have walked from Louisville, a distance of one hundred seventy miles; but, oh,,1 am repaid for all my toil, a thousand times over. . . . The sun has been among the tree tops for more than an hour, and the dew is nearly all taken back, and the shade in these hid basins is creeping away into the unbroken strongholds of the grand old forest. I have enjoyed the trees and scenery of Kentucky exceedingly. How shall I evSr tell of the miles and miles of beauty that have been flowing into me? . . . .1 am in the woods on a hill-top with my back against a moss-clad log. I wish that you could see rrry last evening's bedroom. . It was a few miles south of Louis- 644 JOHN MUIR vrlle where I planned my journey. I spread out my map under a tree, and made up my mind to go through Kentucky, Tennesee, and Georgia to Florida, thence to Cuba, and from that island to some part of South America. But it will only be a hasty walk. I am thankful, however, for so much." In the failure of this project his last serious disappointment awaited him. Stricken with malarial fever, he lay prostrate for two months, .after which he referred to himself as "creeping about, getting plants and strength": by this expression revealing, as usual, his love of Nature as his first impulse, and his realization of physical necessity as secondary. But he yet knew the value of health, and in the effort to regain it, he sailed for California, whence in the late summer following, he wrote that except for an occasional feeling of loneliness, the pleasure of his existence would be complete, and that he should! remain upon the Pacific Coast for eight or nine months. As he acknowledged, "Fate and flowers carried him to California" but the mountains held him until he read the story of the earth which lies sculptured in hieroglyphs upon their flanks. Making his entrance into the Golden State in his lesser qualities of naturalist and botanist, he described his first experiences and impressions with the ingenuousness of the old missionaries: setting aside all the severities of science and giving to his writing the savor of a wonder tale: "Arriving in San Francisco in April, I struck at once into the country. I followed the Diabolo Foothills along the San Jose Valley to Gilroy: thence over the Diabolo Mountains to Valley of San Joaquin by the Pacheco Pass; thence down the valley opposite the mouth of the Merced river; thence across the San Joaquin, and up into the Sierra Nevada to the mammoth trees of Mariposa, and the glorious Yosemite; thence down the Merced to my present position in the county bearing the name of the river. "The goodness of the weather as I journeyed toward Pacheco was beyond all praise and description: fragrant, mellow and bright, the sky was delicious—sweet enough for the breath of angels. Every draught of it gave a separate and distinct piece of pleasure. I do not believe that Adam and Eve ever tasted better in their balmiest nook. The last of the coast range foothills were in near view all the way to Gilroy. Their union with the Valley is by curves and slopes of inimitable beauty, and they were robed with the greenest grass and rich- 64s JOHN MUIR est light I ever beheld, and colored and shaded with myriads of flowers of every hue—chiefly of purple and golden yellow—and hundreds of crystal rills joined song with the larks; filling all the Valley with music like a sea, making it Eden from end to end. "The scenery, too, and all of Nature in the Pass is fairly enchanting: strange and beautiful mountain ferns, low in the dark canyons, and high upon the rocky sunlit peaks; banks of blooming shrub; sprinklings and gatherings of garment flowers, precious and pure as ever enjoyed the sweets of a mountain home. Oh, what streams are there beaming, glancing, each with music of its own, singing as they go in shadow and light, onward upon their lovely changing pathways to the sea! And hills rise over hills, and mountains over mountains, heaving, waving, swelling, in most glorious, overpowering, unreadable majesty. At last, when stricken and faint, like a crushed insect, you hope to escape from all the terrible grandeur of these mountain powers, other fountains, other oceans break forth before you. For, there, in clear view, over heaps and rows of foothills is laid a grand, smooth, outspread plain, watered by a river, and another range of peaky, snow-capped mountains a hundred miles in the distance: that plain is the Valley of the San Joaquin, and those mountains are the Sierra Nevada. The Valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked: one vast, level, even flowerbed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea, ruffled a little in the middle by the tree fringing of the river, and here and there of cross streams from the mountains. Florida is a land of flowers, but for every flower creature that dwells in its most delightsome places, more than a hundred is living here. Here, here is Florida. Here they are not sprinkled apart with grass between as in our prairies, but grasses are sprinkled in the flowers; not as in Cuba, flowers piled upon flowers, heaped and gathered into deep glowing masses. But, side by side, flower to flower, petal to petal, touching but not entwined, branches weaving past and past each other, but free and separate: one smooth garment, mosses next the ground, grasses above, petaled flowers between. "Before studying the flowers of this valley, and their sky, and all their furnitur.e' find sounds and adornments of their home, one can scarce believe that their vast assemblies are permanent,*but rather that, actuated by some great plant-purpose, they have convened from every plain and mountain, and meadow of their kingdom, and that the 646 / r . ,iS*ll. Warn. HALF DOME FROM THE ILLILONETTE FALLS TRAIL "To an observer upon this adamantine old monument in the midst of such scenery, getting glimpses of the thoughts of God, the day seems endless, the sun stands still. Much faithless fuss is made over the passage in the Bible telling of the standing still of the sun for Joshua. Here you may learn that the miracle occurs for every devout mountaineer—for everybody doing anything worth doing, seeing anything worth seeing. One day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as one day, and while yet in the flesh you enjoy immortality." John Muir. Photograph by W. E. Dassonville, San Francisco CATHEDRAL PEAK "Cathedral Peak with its many spires and companion peaks and domes is to the southward and a smooth,billowy multitude of rocks, from fifty feet or less to a thousand feet high, which from their peculiar form seem to be rolling on westward, fill most of the middle ground. Immediately beneath you are the Big Tuolumne Meadows, with an ample swath of dark fine woods on either side, enlivened by the Young river, that is seen sparkling and shimmering as it sways from side to side, tracing as best it can its broad, glacial channel." John Muir. Photograph by W. E. Dassonville, San Francisco j JOHN MUIR different coloring of patches, acres and miles, marked the bounds of the various tribe and family encampments." The quotation just given, is chosen from the riches of a born raconteur. The thought is clothed in words approaching quaintness, and the style flowing on easily, suggests what Wordsworth so happily named "a quiet tune." Equally fascinating to the unlearned is the description of the Yellowstone National Park, published in Volume 81 of the Atlantic Monthly, in which Mr. Muir relates with expert clearness, free from clogging technicalities, the story of the natural drama of the region: dividing it into the successive acts wherein fire or water, in the form of volcanoes or glaciers, played the principal part, and giving to his writing a force and grandeur suggestive of Victor Hugo; as, for example, in the sentences: . • "Now the post-glacial agents are at work on the grand old palimpsest of the park, inscribing new characters; but still in its main, telling features it remains distinctly glacial. The moraine soils are being leveled, sorted, refined, and re-formed, and covered with vegetation the polished pavements and scoring and other superficial glacial inscriptions on the crumbling lavas are being rapidly obliterated; gorges are being cut in the decomposed rhyolites and loose conglomerates, and turrets and pinnacles seem to be springing up like growing trees, while the geysers are depositing miles of sinter and travertine. Nevertheless, the ice-work is scarce blurred as yet. These later effects are only spots and wrinkles on the grand glacial countenance of the park." Again in the succeeding volume of the Atlantic (Number 82), there appears the article in which, perhaps, Mr. Muir reaches the climax of his lighter style. In "Among the Animals of the Yosemite" he describes the Sierra bear as one of the happiest of beings: "all the year round his bread is sure, for some of the thousand kinds that he likes are always in season and accessible, ranged on the shelves of the mountains like stores in a pantry A sheep, or a wounded deer, or a pig, he eats warm, about as quickly as a boy swallows a buttered muffin. After so gross a meal as this, perhaps the next will be strawberries and clover. . . And, as if fearing that anything eatable in all his dominions should escape being eaten, he breaks into cabins to look after sugar and bacon. Occasionally, too, he eats the mountaineer's bed." 651 ' 1 H JOHN MUIR Here, although greed is the quality put forward, the subject of the sketch, far from being rendered repellent, becomes amusing and even attractive, through the application of a few well-chosen words. A contrast to this portrait is offered by the subtile description of the Douglas squirrel, which reflects the darting motion, the very being of the sprightly creature. Of the representative of this species Mr. Muir says: "He is the most influential of the Sierra animals, although small, and the brightest of all the squirrels I know— a squirrel of squirrels, quick mountain vigor and valor condensed, purely wild, and as free from disease as a sunbeam. One can not think of such an animal ever being weary or sick. His fine tail floats now behind, now above him, level or gracefully curled, light and radiant as dry thistledown. His body seems hardly more substantial than his tail. The Douglas is a firm, emphatic bolt of life, full of show and fight, and his movements have none of the elegant deliberation of the gray. They are so quick and keen they almost sting the onlooker, and the acrobatic harlequin-show he makes of himself turns one giddy to see. . . .He goes his ways bold as a lion, up and down and across, round and round, the happiest, merriest of all the hairy tribe, and, at the same time, tremendously earnest and solemn, sunshine incarnate, making every tree tingle with his electric toes. If you prick him, you can not think he will bleed. He seems above the chance and change that beset common mortals, though in busily gathering burrs and nuts he shows us that he has to work for a living, like the rest of us. I never found a dead Douglas. He gets into the world and out of it without being noticed; only in prime is he seen, like some little plants that are visible only when in bloom." We could wish, in the interest of the people that all species of our fauna and flora might be described by the pen of Mr. Muir, since he clothes the dry bones of fact in most attractive form, and, to use the phrase of Addison, succeeds in making "knowledge amiable and lovely to all." But yet had he written more voluminously, had he been content to remain a simple naturalist, we should not have benefited by his studies of the effects of the glacial period. These researches entailed a decade of isolation, and difficult journeys in the Sierras and Alaska, as well as participation in the Corwin Expedition organized in 1881, to search for the ill-fated exploring vessel Jean- nette. By this means, Mr. Muir was enabled to extend his observa- S53 i* is Jm JOHN MUIR . * tions to the Behring Sea and along the coast of Siberia; while, twelve years later, in 1893, he visited Norway and Switzerland further to examine the intensely interesting natural phenomena to the study of which he had given the best years of his life. His belief in the existence of living glaciers in the Sierras was at first combated by scientists of higher academic training, who had made these mountains the subject of their study, and the public was illy disposed to accept the assertions of a "sheepherder" against what appeared to be the authoritative statements of scholars like Whitney, King, Le Comte and Hoffman. "Therefore" wrote Mr. Muir, "although I was myself satisfied regarding the nature of these ice masses, I found that my friends distrusted my deductions, and I determined to collect proofs of the common arithmetical measured kind." These proofs Mr. Muir gathered alone, often with great peril to his life, but always in the certainty that the truth would triumph. He ended by demonstrating the Sierra glaciers to be living, as determined by their motion, which he found simple means to verify. The correctness of his arguments, the sure foundation of his belief were acknowledged by the scientists who had questioned and challenged the lay intruder into their circle; the oldest University in the country conferred upon Jiim an honorary degree; while the Western institution, at which he had acquired a working knowledge of the sciences, bestowed upon him a similar mark of approval. A glacier in Alaska has been called after him, and his memory will go down in scientific history as that of a man of real attainments: one whose name is attached to a discovery, and consequently must live as long as the fact or the thing discovered shall prove of interest or of use. His life- work, by no means ended, or even slackened, has yet passed beyond the period of struggle into that of achievement, variety and well-ordered quiet. He continues to observe Nature and to record his observations, relieving his study by the practical cares incident to the ownership of one of the largest cherry orchards of the world. In this position his practical sense, his close study of growth, his love for everything living make him most successful; while his broad Scotch humor, exemplified in a response to a summons to a scientific expedition among the Sierras, reveals a new and pleasing aspect of his character unsuspected by those who know him only through the facts of his career as geologist and naturalist. The summons came at the annual 653 JOHN MUIR gathering season, and the owner of the orchard was found by the messenger, at his post among heavily-laden trees. A shade of mock despair passed over his face, and picking a cherry, he exclaimed in his native dialect: "Dinna ye see that, mon? That red-faced, bald- headed, sleek, one-legged wretch? I'm an absolute slave to that diwil. So, I can na go, I can na go." From this example and from many others of the kind which might be. adduced, it is plain that the life which we have now considered at some length runs the whole gamut of existence, each note sounding clear and full: the austere, the strenuous and the sorrowful up to the highest notes of pure and simple gayety. * It remains but to accentuate two points: first, his responsiveness to the inspiring source of his endeavor, as witnessed in a descriptive letter to the lady previously mentioned, and here printed for the first :ime; second, his heroism, which, in an instance related by a friend, shows him to be of the purest blood of Alpine climbers: one in whom cowardice and selfishness have been eliminated through the contemplation of Nature clothed in her divine majesty.' Reading this story of courage and devotion, one hears rising in his mind the themes of Beethoven's Heroic Symphony, and certain words of Robert Browning recur also to the memory as a fitting epitaph to John Muir, when he shall have "passed over to the majority": "He did too many grandnesses to note Much of the meaner things along his way." A LETTER FROM THE YOSEMITE VALLEY HERE again (in the Yosemite Valley) are pine trees, and the wind, and living rock and water. I have met two of my ousels on one of the pebbly ripples of the river, where I used :o be with them. Most of the meadow gardens are disenchanted and lead, yet I found a few mint spikes, and asters, and brave sunful jolden-rod, and a patch of the tiny minusculus that has two spots on tach lip. The fragrance, and the color, and the form, and the whole spiritual expression of golden-rod are hopeful and strength-giving :eyond any other flower that I know. A single spike is sufficient to heal unbelief and melancholy. 154 , j THE THREE BROTHERS "No wonder the Indians loved the Yosemite Valley. No wonder they named every salient dome and spire and lake and waterfall. No wonder they fought hard for its possession and wailed loud and long when strong and warlike foes dispossessed them. Pompompesus—the leaping frogs—which we call The Three Brothers, with the quietly flowing Merced at its feet, afforded the Indian rhapsodists a fine theme for one of their imaginative stories." Photograph by W. E. Dassonville, San Francisco vM- 0656$ https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/1288/thumbnail.jpg |
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