Most persons visiting the sequoia grove spend only a few hours in it and depart without seeing a single tree, for the chiefest glories of these mountain kings are wholly invisible to hasty or careless observers. I hope you may be able to spend a good long time in worship amid the glorious columns of this mountain temple. I fancy they are aware of your coming and are waiting. I fondly hope that nothing will occur to prevent your coming. I will endeavor to reach the valley a day or so before you. The night air of the mountains is very cold. You will require plenty of warm blankets. I am sorry that the Doctor has been so suddenly smothered up in business. If he and the priest were in the company according to the _prophecy_ our joy would be full. I am in a perfect tingle with the memories of a year ago and with anticipation glowing bright with all that I love. Farewell. JOHN MUIR. I received your letter containing “The Song of Nature” by Emerson and derived a great deal of pleasure from it. J. M. Five miles west of Yosemite, July 11, [1869.] I need not try to tell you how sorely I am pained by this bitter disappointment. Your Mariposa note of June 22 did not reach Black’s until July 3d, and I did not receive it until the 6th. I met a shepherd a few miles from here yesterday who told me that a letter from Yosemite for me was at Harding’s Mills. I have not yet received it. No dependence can be placed upon the motions of letters in the mountains, and I feared this result on my not receiving anything definite concerning your time of leaving Stockton before I left the plains. I wish now that I had not been entangled with sheep at all but that I had remained among post-offices and joined your party at Snellings. Thus far all of my deepest, purest enjoyments have been taken in solitude, and the fate seems hard that has hindered me from sharing Yosemite with you. We are camped this evening among a bundle of the Merced’s crystal arteries, which have just gone far enough from their silent fountain to be full of lakelets and lilies [?], and the bleating of our flock can neither confuse nor hush the thousand notes of their celestial song. The sun has set, and these glorious shafts of the spruce and pine shoot higher and higher as the darkness comes on. I must say good night while bonds of Nature’s sweetest influences are about me in these sacred mountain halls, and I know that every chord of your being has throbbed and tingled with the same mysterious powers when you were here. Farewell. I am glad to know that you have been allowed to bathe your existence in God’s glorious Sierra Nevadas and sorry that I could not meet you. JOHN MUIR. A few miles north of Yosemite, July 13th, [1869.] We are camped this afternoon upon the bank of the stream that falls into the valley opposite Hutchings’ hotel (Yosemite Falls). We are perhaps three miles from the valley.