Farewell. I’ll see you with my common eyes, and touch you with these very writing fingers ere long.
Remember me cordially to Mrs. Moore and Mr. and all your family, and I am as ever
Your friend,
John Muir.
Yosemite Valley, September 13, 1872.
Yours of Aug. 23rd is received. Le Conte writes me that Agassiz will not come to the valley.
I just got down last evening from a fifteen-day ramble in the basins of Illilouette and Pohono, and start again in an hour for the summit glaciers to see some cañons and to examine the stakes I planted in the ice a month ago.
I would like to come down to see Agassiz, but now is my harvest of rocks and I cannot spare the time.
I shall work in the outer mountains incessantly until the coming of the snow [rest of letter missing].
Yosemite Valley, October 8th, 1872.
Here we are again, and here is your letter of Sept. 24th. I got down last evening, and boo! was I not weary after pushing through the rough upper half of the great Tuolumne Cañon? I have climbed more than twenty-four thousand feet in these ten days, three times to the top of the glacieret of Mt. Hoffman, and once to Mts. Lyell and McClure. I have bagged a quantity of Tuolumne rocks sufficient to build a dozen Yosemites; stripes of cascades longer than ever, lacy or smooth and white as pressed snow; a glacier basin with ten glassy lakes set all near together like eggs in a nest; then El Capitan and a couple of Tissiacks, cañons glorious with yellows and reds of mountain maple and aspen and honeysuckle and ash and new indescribable music immeasurable from strange waters and winds, and glaciers, too, flowing and grinding, alive as any on earth. Shall I pull you out some? Here is a clean, white-skinned glacier from the back of McClure with glassy emerald flesh and singing crystal blood all bright and pure as a sky, yet handling mud and stone like a navvy, building moraines like a plodding Irishman. Here is a cascade two hundred feet wide, half a mile long, glancing this way and that, filled with bounce and dance and joyous hurrah, yet earnest as tempest, and singing like angels loose on a frolic from heaven; and here are more cascades and more, broad and flat like clouds and fringed like flowing hair, with occasional falls erect as pines, and lakes like glowing eyes; and here are visions and dreams, and a splendid set of ghosts, too many for ink and narrow paper.