Review: My First Summer in the Sierra

My First Summer in the Sierra

By John Muir. Houghton Mifflin, 1911, 272 pp. Gutenberg Project: The Writings of John Muir, Sierra Edition, Volume II, 1917. With photographs by Herbert W. Gleason and Charles S. Olcott, and sketches by the author.

Was there ever anyone more exhilarated by nature than John Muir?

"Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days," he writes in My First Summer in the Sierra. "Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show...