I wish you could see the holy morning’s Alpen glow of Shasta.
Farewell. I’ll be down into gray Oakland some time.
I am glad you are so essentially independent of those commonplace plotters that have so marred your peace, eat oranges and hear the larks and wait on the sun.
Ever cordially,
John Muir.
Love to all.
The letter you sent here is also received. Emily’s I will get bye and bye. Love to color Keith.
Sissons Station,
December 21st, 1874.
I have just returned from a fourth Shasta excursion and find yours of the 17th. I wish you could have been with me on Shasta’s shoulder last evening in the sun glow. I was over on the head waters of the McCloud; and what a head! Think of a spring giving rise to a river! I fairly quiver with joyous exultation when I think of it. The infinity of Nature’s glory in rock, cloud, and water! As soon as I beheld the McCloud upon its lower course, I knew that there must be something extraordinary in its Alpine fountains, and I shouted, “O where, my glorious river, do you come from?” Think of a spring fifty yards wide at the mouth issuing from the base of a lava bluff with wild songs, not gloomily from a dark cavy mouth, but from a world of ferns and mosses, gold and green.
I broke my way through chaparral tangle in eager vigor utterly unweariable. The dark blue stream sang solemnly with a deep voice, pooling and bowlder-dashing and an a-a-aing in white flashing rapids, when suddenly I heard water notes I never had heard before. They came from that mysterious spring. And then the Elk forest and the Alpine glow and the sunset,—poor pen cannot tell it.
The sun this morning is at work with its blessings as if it had never blessed before. He never wearies of revealing himself on Shasta. But in a few hours I leave this altar and all its——