Letters to a Friend, Written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, 1866-1879Muir, John
History
Letters to a Friend, Written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, 1866-1879
Muir, John
Natural history -- California; Naturalists -- United States -- Correspondence; Yosemite National Park (Calif.) -- Description and travel
Here we are again, and here is your letter of Sept. 24th. I got down last
evening, and boo! was I not weary after pushing through the rough upper
half of the great Tuolumne Cañon? I have climbed more than twenty-four
thousand feet in these ten days, three times to the top of the glacieret
of Mt. Hoffman, and once to Mts. Lyell and McClure. I have bagged a
quantity of Tuolumne rocks sufficient to build a dozen Yosemites; stripes
of cascades longer than ever, lacy or smooth and white as pressed snow;
a glacier basin with ten glassy lakes set all near together like eggs
in a nest; then El Capitan and a couple of Tissiacks, cañons glorious
with yellows and reds of mountain maple and aspen and honeysuckle and
ash and new indescribable music immeasurable from strange waters and
winds, and glaciers, too, flowing and grinding, alive as any on earth.
Shall I pull you out some? Here is a clean, white-skinned glacier from
the back of McClure with glassy emerald flesh and singing crystal blood
all bright and pure as a sky, yet handling mud and stone like a navvy,
building moraines like a plodding Irishman. Here is a cascade two hundred
feet wide, half a mile long, glancing this way and that, filled with
bounce and dance and joyous hurrah, yet earnest as tempest, and singing
like angels loose on a frolic from heaven; and here are more cascades
and more, broad and flat like clouds and fringed like flowing hair, with
occasional falls erect as pines, and lakes like glowing eyes; and here
are visions and dreams, and a splendid set of ghosts, too many for ink
and narrow paper.
I have not heard anything concerning Le Conte’s glacier lecture, but
he seems to have drawn all he knows of Sierra glaciers and new theories
concerning them so directly from here that I cannot think that he will
claim discovery, etc. If he does, I will not be made poorer.
Professor Kneeland, Secretary Boston Institute of Technology, gathered
some letters I sent to Runkle and that “Tribune” letter, and hashed them
into a compost called a paper for the Boston Historical Society, and
gave me credit for all of the smaller sayings and doings and stole the
broadest truth to himself. I have the proof-sheets of “The Paper” and
will show them to you some time. But all of such meanness can work no
permanent evil to any one except the dealer.
As for the living “glaciers of the Sierras,” here is what I have learned
concerning them. You will have the first chance to steal, for I have
just concluded my experiments on them for the season and have not yet
cast them at any of the great professors, or presidents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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