I will return to the valley in about a week, if I don’t get over-deep
in a crevass.
_Later._ Yours of Monday evening has just come. I am glad your boy is
so soon to feel mother home and its blessings. I hope to meet Torrey,
although I will push iceward as before, but may get back in time. I will
enjoy Agassiz, and Tyndall even more. I’m sorry for poor Stoddard. Tell
him to come.
I’ll see Mrs. H., perhaps, this evening and deliver your message.
Farewell.
New Sentinel Hotel,
Yosemite Valley, May 31, 1872.
Yours announcing the Joaquin and the Doggetts and _more_ is here. I
care not when you come, so that you come calm and timeful. I will try to
compel myself down to you in August, but these years and ages among snows
and rocks have made me far more unfit for the usages of civilization
than you appreciate. My nerves’ strings shrink at the prospect, even
at this distance. But if by diving to that slimy town sea-bottom I can
touch Huxley and Tyndall and mount again with you to calm months in the
Sierras, I will draw a long breath and splash into your fearful muds.
I would rather have you in September and October than at any other time,
but a few weeks of this white water would be very glorious. Merrill
Moores, who was with me in Wisconsin and at your Madison home, will be
here soon to spend a good big block of a while with me. Why can’t you
let Allie join him?
For the last week our valley has been a lake and my shanty is in flood.
But the walls about us are white this morning with snow, which has checked
the free life of our torrents, and the meadows will soon be walkable
again. The snow fell last night and this morning. The falls will sing
loud and long this year, and the mountains are fat in thick snow that
the sun will find hard to fry.
Midnight.
O Mrs. Carr, that you could be here to mingle in this night moon glory!
I am in the Upper Yosemite Falls and can hardly calm to write, but, from
my thick baptism an hour ago, you have been so present that I must try
to fix you a written thought.
In the afternoon I came up the mountain here with a blanket and a piece
of bread to spend the night in prayer among the spouts of the fall. But
now what can I say more than wish again that you might expose your soul
to the rays of this heaven?
Silver from the moon illumines this glorious creation which we term falls
and has laid a magnificent double prismatic bow at its base. The tissue
of the falls is delicately filmed on the outside like the substance of
spent clouds, and the stars shine dimly through it. In the solid shafted
body of the falls is a vast number of passing caves, black and deep,
with close white convolving spray for sills and shooting comet shoots
above and down their sides like lime crystals in a cave, and every atom
of the magnificent being, from the thin silvery crest that does not dim
the stars to the inner arrowy hardened shafts that strike onward like
thunderbolts in sound and energy, all is life and spirit, every bolt and
spray feels the hand of God. O the music that is blessing me now! The
sun of last week has given the grandest notes of all the yearly anthem
and they echo in every fibre of me.
I said that I was going to stop here until morning and pray a whole
blessed night with the falls and the moon, but I am too wet and must go
down. An hour or two ago I went out somehow on a little seam that extends
along the wall behind the falls. I suppose I was in a trance, but I
can positively say that I was in the body for it is sorely battered and
wetted. As I was gazing past the thin edge of the fall and away through
beneath the column to the brow of the rock, some heavy splashes of
water struck me, driven hard against the wall. Suddenly I was darkened;
down came a section of the outside tissue composed of spent comets. I
crouched low, holding my breath, and, anchored to some angular flakes of
rocks, took my baptism with moderately good faith. When I dared to look
up after the swaying column admitted light, I pounced behind a piece
of ice which was wedged tight in the wall, and I no longer feared being
washed off, and steady moonbeams slanting past the arching meteors gave
me confidence to escape to this snug place where McChesney and I slept
one night, where I had a fire to dry my socks. This rock shelf extending
behind the falls is about five hundred feet above the base of the fall
on the perpendicular rock-face.
How little do we know of ourselves, of our profoundest attractions and
repulsions, of our spiritual affinities! How interesting does man become,
considered in his relations to the spirit of this rock and water! How
significant does every atom of our world become amid the influences
of those beings unseen, spiritual, angelic mountaineers that so throng
these pure mansions of crystal foam and purple granite!
I cannot refrain from speaking to this little bush at my side and to the
spray-drops that come to my paper and to the individual sands of the slope
I am sitting upon. Ruskin says that the idea of foulness is essentially
connected with what he calls dead unorganized matter. How cordially I
disbelieve him to-night! and were he to dwell awhile among the powers
of these mountains, he would forget all dictionary differences between
the clean and the unclean and he would lose all memory and meaning of
the diabolical, sin-begotten term, _foulness_.
Well, I must go down. I am disregarding all of the Doctor’s physiology
in sitting here in this universal moisture.
Farewell to you and to all the beings about us! I shall have a glorious
walk down the mountains in this thin white light, over the open brows
grayed with Selaginella and through the thick black shadow caves in the
live oaks all stuck full of snowy lances of moonlight.
New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley,
July 6th, 1872.
Yours of Tuesday evening telling of our Doggetts and Ned and Merrill
Moores has come, and so has the lamp and book. I have not yet tried the
lamp, but it is splendid in shape and shines grand as gold. The Lyell
is just what I wanted.
I think that your measure of the Doggetts is exactly right--as good as
civilized people can be. They have grown to the top of town culture and
have sent out some shoots half gropingly into the spirit sky.
I am very glad to know that Ned is growing strong. Perhaps we may see
South America together yet. I hope to see you come to your own of mountain
fountains soon. Perhaps Mrs. Hutchings may go with us. You live so fully
in my own life that I cannot realize that I have not yet seen you here;
a year or two of waiting seems nothing.
Possibly I may be down on your coast this fall or next, for I want to
see what relations the coast and coast mountains have to the Sierras.
Also I want to go north and south along this range and then among the
basins and ranges eastward. My subject is expanding at a most unfollowable
pace. I could write something with data already harvested, but I am not
satisfied.
I have just returned from Hetch Hetchy with Mrs. Moore. Of course we
had a glory and a fun--the two articles in about parallel columns of
equal size. Meadows grassed and lilies head-high, spangled river-reaches
and currentless pools, cascades countless and unpaintable in form and
whiteness, groves that heaven all the valley. You were with us in all
our joy and you will come again.
I am a little weary and half inclined to truantism from mobs however
blessed, in some unfindable grove. I start in a few minutes for Cloud’s
Rest with Mr. and Mrs. Moore. I like Mrs. Moore and Mr. first-rate.
My love to the Doctor and all the boys. I hope for Merrill daily.