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
What you say respecting the littleness of the number who are called to
“the pure and deep communion of the beautiful, all-loving Nature,” is
particularly true of the hardworking, hard-drinking, stolid Canadians.
In vain is the glorious chart of God in Nature spread out for them. So
many acres chopped is their motto, as they grub away amid the smoke of
the magnificent forest trees, black as demons and material as the soil
they move upon. I often think of the Doctor’s lecture upon the condition
of the different races of men as controlled by physical agencies. Canada,
though abounding in the elements of wealth, is too difficult to subdue
to permit the first few generations to arrive at any great intellectual
development. In my long rambles last summer I did not find a single
person who knew anything of botany and but a few who knew the meaning of
the word; and wherein lay the charm that 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. Do
not these answer well to the person described by the poet in these lines?
“A primrose by the river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And nothing more.”
I thank Dr. Carr for his kind remembrance of me, but still more for the
good patience he had with so inept a scholar.
We remember in a peculiar way those who first gave us the story of
Redeeming Love from the great book of Revelation, and I shall not
forget the Doctor, who first laid before me the great book of Nature,
and though I have taken so little from his hand he has at least shown
me where those mines of priceless knowledge lie and how to reach them.
O how frequently, Mrs. Carr, when lonely and wearied, have I wished
that like some hungry worm I could creep into that delightful kernel of
your house, your library, with its portraits of scientific men, and so
bountiful a store of their sheaves amid the blossom and verdure of your
little kingdom of plants, luxuriant and happy as though holding their
leaves to the open sky of the most flower-loving zone in the world!
That “sweet day” did as you wished reach our hollow, and another is with
us now. The sky has the haze of autumn, and excepting the aspen not a
tree has motion. Upon our enclosing wall of verdure new tints appear,
the gorgeous dyes of autumn are to be plainly seen, and the forest seems
to have found out that again its leaf must fade. Our stream, too, has a
less cheerful sound, and as it bears its foam-bells pensively away from
the shallow rapids it seems to feel that summer is past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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