Letters to a Friend, Written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, 1866-1879

by John Muir

For the last week our valley has been a lake and my shanty is in flood. But the walls about us are white this morning with snow, which has checked the free life of our torrents, and the meadows will soon be walkable again. The snow fell last night and this morning. The falls will sing loud and long this year, and the mountains are fat in thick snow that the sun will find hard to fry.

Midnight.

O Mrs. Carr, that you could be here to mingle in this night moon glory! I am in the Upper Yosemite Falls and can hardly calm to write, but, from my thick baptism an hour ago, you have been so present that I must try to fix you a written thought.

In the afternoon I came up the mountain here with a blanket and a piece of bread to spend the night in prayer among the spouts of the fall. But now what can I say more than wish again that you might expose your soul to the rays of this heaven?

Silver from the moon illumines this glorious creation which we term falls and has laid a magnificent double prismatic bow at its base. The tissue of the falls is delicately filmed on the outside like the substance of spent clouds, and the stars shine dimly through it. In the solid shafted body of the falls is a vast number of passing caves, black and deep, with close white convolving spray for sills and shooting comet shoots above and down their sides like lime crystals in a cave, and every atom of the magnificent being, from the thin silvery crest that does not dim the stars to the inner arrowy hardened shafts that strike onward like thunderbolts in sound and energy, all is life and spirit, every bolt and spray feels the hand of God. O the music that is blessing me now! The sun of last week has given the grandest notes of all the yearly anthem and they echo in every fibre of me.

I said that I was going to stop here until morning and pray a whole blessed night with the falls and the moon, but I am too wet and must go down. An hour or two ago I went out somehow on a little seam that extends along the wall behind the falls. I suppose I was in a trance, but I can positively say that I was in the body for it is sorely battered and wetted. As I was gazing past the thin edge of the fall and away through beneath the column to the brow of the rock, some heavy splashes of water struck me, driven hard against the wall. Suddenly I was darkened; down came a section of the outside tissue composed of spent comets. I crouched low, holding my breath, and, anchored to some angular flakes of rocks, took my baptism with moderately good faith. When I dared to look up after the swaying column admitted light, I pounced behind a piece of ice which was wedged tight in the wall, and I no longer feared being washed off, and steady moonbeams slanting past the arching meteors gave me confidence to escape to this snug place where McChesney and I slept one night, where I had a fire to dry my socks. This rock shelf extending behind the falls is about five hundred feet above the base of the fall on the perpendicular rock-face.

How little do we know of ourselves, of our profoundest attractions and repulsions, of our spiritual affinities! How interesting does man become, considered in his relations to the spirit of this rock and water! How significant does every atom of our world become amid the influences of those beings unseen, spiritual, angelic mountaineers that so throng these pure mansions of crystal foam and purple granite!

I cannot refrain from speaking to this little bush at my side and to the spray-drops that come to my paper and to the individual sands of the slope I am sitting upon. Ruskin says that the idea of foulness is essentially connected with what he calls dead unorganized matter. How cordially I disbelieve him to-night! and were he to dwell awhile among the powers of these mountains, he would forget all dictionary differences between the clean and the unclean and he would lose all memory and meaning of the diabolical, sin-begotten term, foulness.

Well, I must go down. I am disregarding all of the Doctor’s physiology in sitting here in this universal moisture.

Farewell to you and to all the beings about us! I shall have a glorious walk down the mountains in this thin white light, over the open brows grayed with Selaginella and through the thick black shadow caves in the live oaks all stuck full of snowy lances of moonlight.