Wilderness Essays

by John Muir

though hardships were encountered, and a few dangers, the wild wonderland made compensation beyond our most extravagant hopes.

but rich in a notable experience.

How keenly bright were the stars that night in the frosty sky, and how impressive was the thunder of the icebergs, rolling, swelling, reverberating through the solemn stillness! I was too happy to sleep.

it was inconceivable that nature could have anything finer to show

we seen the heavens open and God made manifest, our attention could not have been more tremendously strained.

until all the mighty host stood transfigured, hushed, and thoughtful, as if awaiting the coming of the Lord. The white, rayless light of the morning, seen when I was alone amid the silent peaks of the Sierra, had always seemed to me the most telling of the terrestrial manifestations of God.

feeling that whatever the future might have in store, the treasures we had gained would enrich our lives forever.

As we sat by the camp-fire the brightness of the sky brought on a long talk with the Indians about the stars; and their eager, childlike attention was refreshing to see as compared with the decent, deathlike apathy of weary civilized people, in whom natural curiosity has been quenched in toil and care and poor, shallow comfort.

How strong I felt after my exhilarating scramble, and how glad I was that my good angel had called me before the glorious night succeeding so glorious a morning had been spent!

but from all those deadly, crushing, bitter experiences comes this delicate life and beauty, to teach us that what we in our faithless ignorance and fear call destruction is creation.

so high and so divinely clad in clouds and air that they seem to belong more to heaven than to earth;

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.

And so goes the song, change succeeding change in glorious harmony through all the seasons and years.

Music is one of the attributes of matter, into whatever forms it may be organized.

Or, choked in the sediments of society, so tired of the world, here will your hard doubts disappear, your carnal incrustations melt off, and your soul breathe deep and free in God’s shoreless atmosphere of beauty and love.

To lovers of the wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away. Their spiritual power and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends.