Title:
Letter from [John Muir] to [J. B.] Mc Chesney, 1872 Dec 10.
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:
[J. B.] Mc Chesney
Date:
1872 Dec 10
2008
Type:
Text
Format:
Image/jpeg2000
Identifier:
muir02_0996-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The unpublished works of John Muir are copyrighted by the Muir-Hanna Trust.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:
Original letter returned to Mrs. McChesney To J. B. McChesney Yosemite, Dec. 10th, 1872. Dear McChesney: Tours of
Nov. 30th is here. Many thanks for the plants, though I am not much wiser. I knew the generic names of the first three. Only
two are fully named. I suppose that the specimens I sent were too small and fragmentary to be determined with certainty. If
I could only have access to books containing these plants I could easily nams them. I have read Tyndall's Hours of Exercise
etc. Tyndall is a true man. with eyes that can see far down in the fountain truths of nature. I am glad to know that you
miss no opportunity in seeking Nature's altars. May she be good to you and feed your soul while you labor amid those Oakland
wastes of civilization. I love the ocean as I do the mountains indeed the mountains are an ocean with harder waves than yours.
You must be very happy in communion with so many kindred minds. I hope to know Stoddari some day. Tell him that I am going
to build a nest and that it will always be open to him. Come next year, all of you. Come to these purest of terrestrial fountains.
Come and receive baptism and absolution from civilized sins. You were but sprinkled last year. Come and be immersed You have
never seen our valley with her jewels on, never seen her flowers of snow. A few days ago many a flower ripened in the fields
of air and they have fallen to us. All the trees and the bushes are flowered beyond summer, bowed down in snow bloom and all
the rocks are buried. The day after the storm (a most damnable name for the flowering of the clouds) I lay out on the meadow
to eat a grand meal of new-made beauty, and about midday I suddenly wanted the outside mountains, and so cast off my coat
and ran up towards Glacier Point. I soon was near the top, and was very hungry for the view that was so grandly mingled and
covered with snow and sky. but the snow was now more than ten feet deep and dusty and light as winter fog. I tried to wallow
and swim it, but the slope was so steep that I always fell back and sank out of sight, and I was fully baffled. I had a glorious
slide downwards. Hawthorne speaks of the spirituality of locomotive railroad travel,but this balmy slide in the mealy snow
out-spiritualized all other motions that I ever made in space. Farewell, write again. I am lonely. John Muir John Muir,
Dec. 10, 1872 written on back of letter