Preface 



FORTY years ago John Muir wrote to a friend; "I 

 am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer. . . . Civili- 

 zation and fever, and all the morbidness that has been 

 hooted at me, have not dimmed my glacial eyes, and 

 I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's 

 loveliness." How gloriously he fulfilled the promise 

 of his early manhood! Fame, all unbidden, wore a 

 path to his door, but he always remained a modest, 

 unspoiled mountaineer. Kindred spirits, the greatest 

 of his time, sought him out, even in his mountain 

 cabin, and felt honored by his friendship. Ralph 

 Waldo Emerson urged him to visit Concord and rest 

 awhile from the strain of his solitary studies in the 

 Sierra Nevada. But nothing could dislodge him 

 from the glacial problems of the high Sierra; with 

 passionate interest he kept at his task. 'The gran- 

 deur of these forces and their glorious results," he once 

 wrote, "overpower me and inhabit my whole being. 

 Waking or sleeping, I have no rest. In dreams I read 

 blurred sheets of glacial writing, or follow lines of 

 cleavage, or struggle with the difficulties of some ex- 

 traordinary rock-form." 



There is a note of pathos, the echo of an unfulfilled 

 hope, in the record of his later visit to Concord. " It 

 was seventeen years after our parting on. Wawona 

 ridge that I stood beside his [Emerson's] grave under 



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