JOHN MUIR 

 By David Starr Jordan 



It is not easy to write of my good friend, John Muir. The im- 

 pression of his personaHty was so strong on those who knew 

 him that all words seem cheap beside it. Those who never knew 

 him can never, through any word of ours, be brought to realize 

 what they have missed. 



John Muir first came to my notice in Indianapolis, forty years 

 ago, but he was gone before I came there. He was a printer, I 

 believe, in those days, and he made friends, for he was rich in 

 wisdom and in love of nature. Five years later, in San Francis- 

 co, I met him frequently. He was lately back from the Yosemi- 

 te, where, in rollicking enthusiasm, he had written the finest 

 bird biography in existence, the story of the Water Ouzel in the 

 "Ouzel Basin" of the Brewer range. 



In those days every meeting with him was a fresh joy. He 

 was possessed with love and the enthusiasm for a fresh great 

 mountain range, almost new to literature in those days, but fit 

 to dominate it when the Alps and the Apennines have vanished, 

 swallowed up in the sea of blood. He had, moreover, a quaint, 

 crisp way of talking, his literary style in fact, and none of the 

 nature lovers, the men who know how to feel in the presence of 

 great things and beautiful, have expressed their craft better 

 than he. 



There is another Scotsman of the cosmopolitan order to 

 whom, in many ways, John Muir bore a strong resemblance. 

 John Muir cared little for world-politics, and James Bryce 

 knew little of the songs of birds, but these two great men looked 

 on life and the universe in much the same way, both frank- 

 spoken and absolutely democratic; both open-eyed to all phe- 

 nomena of the world, whatever and wheresoever they be ; both 

 wandering wide from their homes ; both large-brained, cosmo- 

 politan citizens of the world, the world God made and which 

 lies open to us all the time. 



