Alaska Notes Summer of 1890, 1890 [1895; 1912?], Image 4

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 2019
• Subjects: glacier; glaciers; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn-a2/4; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmn-a2/article/1003/type/native/viewcontent/MuirReel33_Notebook02_Img004.jpg

2 down to the [smooth] spacious levels however richly [they may be] mantled with sunshine & flowers [& light]. But wild places are [not] no [ ] easily found by busy people. Wildness is being rapidly rubbed off the continent in most accessible places & Alaska may well be prized as the [noblest] & most enduring of all the wilds of the world accessible to ordinary tourists. Oftentimes on some beautiful glacier meadow of the Sierra I have been so charmed that I would have been willing to be tethered to a stake there forever like a horse at pasture with only bread to eat & without hopes of seeing a single human being, content with the company earthly or heavenly that might come to me there & to revel in the perfect beauty about me through all the seasons. So also in [glorious] abounding exuberance of the tropics we would abide forever were we not dragged & driven [& pulled away] by the same mysterious forces that send birds & animals on their travels. [While on the other hand] the polar regions too are so enchantingly beautiful we would gladly stay there also to enjoy the huge round nightless days of summer [sunful and nightless] like heaven the mysterious shining ocean of ice, the boundless tundras covered with bloom & throbbing with [warm] hot glad life [in endless abundance] & the one huge [silent] hushed [serene] night of winter with its stars & snow crystals & auroras one mass of celestial radiance [shining in space] serene & silent. Easy then it is to believe our world is a star, for it looks like one as bright & as silent as any of its neighbors. 3 Sauntering in any wilderness is delightful through woods, rocks, bogs, plains & deserts & green shaggy meadows [&] over fields of snow & the crisp crystal prairies of the glaciers, drifting like thistledown responsive to every breeze of influence [however fine] that chances to touch us. Most of the ones shorter walks are of this kind, a drift on currents gentle & invisible bearing us we ...