Wilderness Essays

by John Muir

He might, in fact, have had a successful career in industry. But when a dropped file was propelled into his eye by a moving belt and he nearly lost his sight, Muir decided to devote his life to a study of the natural world.

He carried in his pack small volumes of the poems of Robert Burns, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the New Testament, and a journal on the inside cover of which he had written, “John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe.”

“I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness.”

Unarmed, carrying only a few crusts of bread, a tin cup, a small portion of tea, a notebook and a few scientific instruments, Muir walked into the vastness of the Sierras to search out truths.

only brave men had a right to look for Heaven’s care, therefore all childish fear must be put away.

on this mountain-top, amid so much ice, in the heart of so clear and frosty a night, everything was luminous, and I seemed to be poised in a vast hollow between two skies of equal brightness.

Even the blind may be benefited by laving and bathing in the balmy, velvety atmosphere, and the unjust as well as the just; for I fancy that even sins must be washed away in such a climate, and at the feet of such altars as the Alaska mountains are.

The smallest of the islands are mere dots, but how beautiful they are! The trees growing on them seem like handfuls that have been culled from the neighboring woods, nicely sorted and arranged, and then set in the water to keep them fresh, the fringing trees leafing out like flowers against the rim of a vase.

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You cannot feel yourself out of doors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.