Title:
Letter from John Muir to [Jeanne C. Carr], [1872 Spring].
Creator:
John Muir
Publisher:
University of the Pacific Library Holt-Atherton Special Collections. Please contact this institution directly to obtain copies
of the images or permission to publish or use them beyond educational purposes.
Contributor:
[Jeanne C. Carr]
Date:
[1872 Spring]
2008
Type:
Text
Format:
Image/jpeg2000
Identifier:
muir02_0834-md-1
Source:
Original letter dimensions: 33 x 21.5 cm.
Language:
eng
Coverage:
[Yosemite]
Rights:
Copyrighted
The unpublished works of John Muir are copyrighted by the Muir-Hanna Trust. To purchase copies of images and/or obtain permission
to publish or exhibit them, see
http://library.pacific.edu/ha/forms
Muir-Hanna Trust
1984
Transcription:
Letter 69 Letter copied from typewritten, bound set, as this letter is missing in mounted series of letters to Mrs. Carr
To Mrs. Ezra S. Carr Spring, 1872 First portion of letter cut from page upward into light to the very heart of the sun
and downward miles deep among Holy Ghosts of glaciers and seas of mountain domes. First part of the letter missing. ...
I had a letter from Emerson. He judges me and my loose drifting voyages as kindly as yourself. The compliments of you two
are enough to spoil one, but I fancy that he, like you, considers that I am so mountain-tanned and storm-beaten I may bear
it. I owe all of my best friends to you. A prophecy in this letter of Emerson's recalled one of yours sent me when growing
at the bottom of a mossy maple hollow in the Canada woods- that I would one day be with you, Doctor,and Priest in Yosemite.
Emerson prophesies in similar dialect that I will one day go to him and better men in New England, or something to that effect.
I feel like objecting in popular slang that I can't see it. I shall indeed go gladly to the Atlantic Coast as he prophesies,
but only to see him and the Glacier ghosts of the North. Runkle wants to make a teacher of me, but I have been too long wild,
too befogged and befogged to burn well in their patent, high heated, educational furnaces. I had a good letter from LeConte.
He evidently doesn't know what to think of the huge lumps of ice that I sent him. I don't wonder at his cautious withholding
of judgment. When my mountain mother first told me the tale I could hardly dare to believe either, and kept saying what? like
a child half awake. Farewell. My love to the Doctor and the boys. I hope the Doctor will run away from his enormous bundles
of duty and rest a summer with the mountains. I have a great deal to ask him. I have begun to build my cabin. You will have
a home in Yosemite. Ever thine, J. Muir