Title:
Letter from [John Muir] to Louie [Strentzel], 1879 Oct 9.
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:
Louie [Strentzel]
Date:
1879 Oct 9
2008
Type:
Text
Format:
Image/jpeg2000
Identifier:
muir03_1159-md-1
Source:
Original letter dimensions: 21 x 13.5 cm.
Language:
eng
Coverage:
Fort Wrangel, Alaska
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The unpublished works of John Muir are copyrighted by the Muir-Hanna Trust.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:
Fort Wrangel, Alaska Oct 9th 1879. Oct 14th noon Leave for the North in a few minutes Indians waiting? Farewell Dear Louie.
Your letter of Aug. 12th has just now reached me, forwarded from Port Townsend. It seems every summer my gains from Gods wilds
grow greater. This last seems the greatest of all. For the first few weeks I was so feverishly excited with the bounders exuberance
of the woods, the wilderness of great ice floods, the manifest scriptures of the ice-sheet that modeled the lovely archipelagoes
along the coast, that I could hardly settle down to the steady labor required in making any sort of truth ones own. But I
m working now, feel unable to leave the field. Had a most glorious time of it among the stick illegible glaciers, which in
some shape or other will reach you. Surely you would not wave me away from this work, dawdling in a weak wilted way on your
Counge dozing drying like a castaway ship on the beach. The charmed line you want you now receive safe well. Im fully at home
here now. Little Anna Vanderbilt, two years old is the heart kernel of this home. She often makes me think of Helen A dainty
white dot of a lass, dink as a daisy, fair as any flower in the dew our little Doctor of Divinity, preaching precious bits
of love. Rocking toddling over the Carpet like a canoe in a tide-rip with sturdy z illegible of will, half angle half angel,
celestial terrestrial happily blended.