Ever your friend,
J. Muir.
New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite,
July 14th, 1872.
Yours announcing Dr. Gray is received. I have great longing for Gray, whom I feel to be a great, progressive, unlimited man like Darwin and Huxley and Tyndall. I will be most glad to meet him. You are unweariable in your kindness to me, and you helm my fate more than all the world beside.
I am approaching a kind of fruiting-time in this mountain work and I want very much to see you. All say write, but I don’t know how or what, and besides I want to see North and South and the midland basins and the seacoast and all the lake-basins and the cañons, also the alps of every country and the continental glaciers of Greenland, before I write the book we have been speaking of; and all this will require a dozen years or twenty, and money. The question is what will I write now, etc. I have learned the alphabet of ice and mountain structure here, and I think I can read fast in other countries. I would let others write what I have read here, but that they make so damnable a hash of it and ruin so glorious a unit.
I miss the Moores because they were so cordial and kind to me. Mrs. Moore believes in ice and can preach it too. I wish you could bring Whitney and her together and tell me the fight. Mrs. M. made the most sensible visit to our mountains of all the comers I have known. Mr. Moore is a man who thinks, and he took to this mountain structure like a pointer to partridges.
I am glad your Ned is growing strong; then we will yet meet this summer in Yosemite places. Talk to Mrs. Moore about Hetch Hetchy, etc. She knows it all from Hog Ranch to highest sea-wave cascades, and higher, yet higher.
I ought not to fun away letter space in speaking to you. I am weary and impractical and fit for nothing serious until I am tuned and toned by a few weeks of calm.
Farewell. I will see you and we will plan work and ease and days of holy mountain rest. Remember me to Ned and all the boys and to the Doctor, who ought to come hither with you.
Ever your friend,
John Muir.