I chose a camping ground on the brink of one of the lakes, where a thicket of hemlock spruce sheltered me from the night wind. Then after making a tin cupful of tea, I sat by my campfire reflecting on the grandeur and significance of the glacial records I had seen. As the night advanced, the mighty rock-walls of my mountain mansion seemed to come nearer, while the starry sky in glorious brightness stretched across like a ceiling from wall to wall, and fitted closely down into all the spiky irregularities of the summits. Then, after a long fireside rest, and a glance at my note-book, I cut a few leafy branches for a bed, and fell into the clear, death-like sleep of the mountaineer.
No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be.... Perched like a fly on this Yosemite dome, I gaze and sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb admiration without definite hope of ever learning much, yet with the longing, unresisting effort that lies at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the vast display of God's power, and eager to offer self-denial and renunciation with eternal toil to learn any lesson in the divine manuscript.—July 20, 1869.
To read Muir is to be in the presence not of a tranquil, chatty companion like Burroughs, who saunters leisurely along the spring meadows listening for the birds just arrived the night before and comparing the dates of the hyla's first cry; it is rather to be with a tempestuous soul whose units are storms and mountain ranges and mighty glacial moraines, who strides excitedly along the bare tops of ragged peaks and rejoices in their vastness and awfulness, who cries, "Come with me along the glaciers and see God making landscapes!" One gets at the heart of Muir in an episode like this, the description of a terrific storm in the Yuba region in December, 1874:
The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of them all rocked down to its roots with a motion plainly perceptible when one leaned against it. Nature was holding high festival, and every fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement. I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often falling in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the glad anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees—spruce, and fir, and pine, and leafless oak. ... Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of its topmost needles.... Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.
He had more humor than Burroughs, more even than Thoreau, a sly Scotch drollery that was never boisterous, never cynical. In the Bloody Cañon he meets the Mono Indians and finds little in them that is romantic:
The dirt on their faces was fairly stratified and seemed so ancient in some places and so undisturbed as almost to possess a geological significance. The older faces were, moreover, strangely blurred and divided into sections by furrows that looked like cleavage joints, suggesting exposure in a castaway condition on the mountains for ages. Viewed at a little distance they appeared as mere dirt specks on the landscape.
Like Thoreau, he was a mystic and a poet. He inherited mysticism with his Scotch blood as he inherited wildness and the love of freedom. He was not a mere naturalist, a mere scientist bent only on facts and laws: he was a searcher after God, even as Thoreau. As one reads him, one feels one's soul expanding, one's horizons widening, one's hands reaching out for the infinite. The message of Muir is compelling and eager:
Next to the light of the dawn on high mountain-tops, the alpenglow is the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God;... stay on this good fire mountain and spend the night among the stars. Watch their glorious bloom until dawn, and get one more baptism of light. Then, with fresh heart, go down to your work, and whatever your fate, under whatever ignorance or knowledge you may afterwards chance to suffer, you will remember these fine, wild views, and look back with joy.
And again after his joyous study of the water ouzel, a prose lyric, rapturous and infectious, he cries:
And so I might go on, writing words, words, words; but to what purpose? Go see him and love him, and through him as through a window look into Nature's warm heart.