Tahoe City,
November 3rd, [1873.]
My dear Friends Dr. and Mrs. Carr,—
I received the news of your terrible bereavement a few moments ago, and can only say that you have my heart sympathy and prayer that our Father may sustain and soothe you.
Dr. Kellogg and Billy Simms left me a week ago at Mono, going directly to Yosemite. I reached this queen of lakes, two days ago and rode down around the shore on the east side. Will continue on around up the west coast homeward through Lake and Hope valleys and over the Sierra to Yosemite by the Virginia Creek trail, or Sonora road if much snow should fall. Will reach Yosemite in about a week.
Somehow I had no hopes of meeting you here. I could not hear you or see you, yet you shared all of my highest pleasures, as I sauntered through the piney woods, pausing countless times to absorb the blue glimpses of the lake, all so heavenly clean, so terrestrial yet so openly spiritual. I wish, my dear, dear friends, that you could share this divine day with me here. The soul of Indian summer is brooding this blue water, and it enters one’s being as nothing else does. Tahoe is surely not one but many. As I curve around its heads and bays and look far out on its level sky fairly tinted and fading in pensive air, I am reminded of all the mountain lakes I ever knew, as if this were a kind of water heaven to which they all had come.
Yosemite Valley,
October 7th, 1874.
I expected to have been among the foot-hill drift long ago, but the mountains fairly seized me, and, ere I knew, I was up the Merced Cañon, where we were last year, past Shadow and Merced lakes and our soda springs, etc. I returned last night. Had a glorious storm and a thousand sacred beauties that seemed yet more and more divine. I camped four nights at Shadow Lake, at the old place in the pine thickets. I have ousel tales to tell. I was alone, and during the whole excursion, or period rather, was in a kind of calm, uncurable ecstasy. I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.
How glorious my studies seem, and how simple! I found out a noble truth concerning the Merced moraines that escaped me hitherto. Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. My own special self is nothing. My feet have recovered their cunning. I feel myself again. Tell Keith the colors are coming to the groves.
I leave Yosemite for over the mountains to Mono [?] and Lake Tahoe in a week, thence anywhere,—Shastaward, etc. I think I may be at Brownsville, Yuba County, where I may get a letter from you. I promised to call on Emily Pelton there.