JOHN MUIR AS I KNEW HIM* 

 By Robert Underwood Johnson 



Sometime, in the evolution of America, we shall throw off 

 the two shackles that retard our progress as an artistic nation — 

 Philistinism and commercialism — and advance with freedom to- 

 ward the love of beauty as a principle. Then it will not be 

 enough that one shall love merely one kind of beauty, each 

 worker his own art, or that art shall be separated from life as 

 something too precious for use ; men will search for beauty as 

 scientists search for truth, knowing that while truth can make 

 one free, it is beauty of some sort, as addressed to the eye, the 

 ear, the mind, or the moral sense, that alone can give perma- 

 nent happiness. When that apocalyptic day shall come, the 

 world will look back to the time we live in and remember the 

 voice of one crying in the wilderness and bless the name of 

 John Muir. To some, beauty seems but an accident of creation : 

 to Muir it was the very smile of God. He sung the glory of na- 

 ture like another Psalmist, and, as a true artist, was unashamed 

 of his emotions. 



An instance of this is told of him as he stood with an ac- 

 quaintance at one of the great view-points of the Yosemite Val- 

 ley, and, filled with wonder and devotion, wept. His companion, 

 more stolid than most, could not understand his feeling, and 

 was so thoughtless as to say so. **Mon," said Muir, with the 

 Scotch dialect into which he often lapsed, "Can ye see unmoved 

 the glory of the Almighty?" "Oh, it's very fine," was the reply, 

 "but I do not wear my heart upon my sleeve." "Ah, my dear 

 mon," said Muir, "in the face of such a scene as this, it's no 

 time to be thinkin' o' where you wear your heart." 



No astronomer was ever more devout. The love of nature 

 was his religion, but it was not without a personal God, whom 

 he thought as great in the decoration of a flower as in the 

 launching of a glacier. The old Scotch training persisted 



* Read, in part, at the meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 

 in New York, January 6, 1916. 



