Travels In Alaska eBook

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Forty years ago John Muir wrote to a friend; "I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer... Civilization and fever, and app the morbidness that has been hooted at me, have not dimmed my glacial eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature''s loveliness." How gloriously he fulfilled the promise has is early manhood! Fame, all unbidden, wrote a path to his door, but he always remained a modest,unspoiled mountaineer. Kindred spirits, the greatest of his time, sough him out, even in his mountain cabin, and felt honored by his friendship. Ralph Waldo Emerson urged him to visit Concord and rest awhile from the strain of his solitary studies in the Sierra Nevada. But nothing could dislodge him from the glacial problems of the high Sierra; with passionate interest he kept at his task. "The grandeur of these forces and their glorious results," he once wrote, "overpower me and inhabit results," he once wrote, "overpower me and inhabit my whole being. Walking or Sleeping, I have no rest. In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial writing, or follow lines of cleavage, or struggle with the difficulties of some extraordinary rock-form."

There is a note of pathos, the echo of an unfulfilled hope, in the record of his later visit to Concord.