Ever your friend,
J. MUIR.
New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite,
July 14th, 1872.
Yours announcing Dr. Gray is received. I have great longing for Gray,
whom I feel to be a great, progressive, unlimited man like Darwin and
Huxley and Tyndall. I will be most glad to meet him. You are unweariable
in your kindness to me, and you helm my fate more than all the world
beside.
I am approaching a kind of fruiting-time in this mountain work and I want
very much to see you. All say _write_, but I don’t know how or what,
and besides I want to see North and South and the midland basins and
the seacoast and all the lake-basins and the cañons, also the alps of
every country and the continental glaciers of Greenland, before I write
the book we have been speaking of; and all this will require a dozen
years or twenty, and money. The question is what will I write now, etc.
I have learned the alphabet of ice and mountain structure here, and I
think I can read fast in other countries. I would let others write what
I have read here, but that they make so damnable a hash of it and ruin
so glorious a unit.
I miss the Moores because they were so cordial and kind to me. Mrs. Moore
believes in ice and can preach it too. I wish you could bring Whitney
and her together and tell me the fight. Mrs. M. made the most sensible
visit to our mountains of all the comers I have known. Mr. Moore is a
man who thinks, and he took to this mountain structure like a pointer
to partridges.
I am glad your Ned is growing strong; then we will yet meet this summer
in Yosemite places. Talk to Mrs. Moore about Hetch Hetchy, etc. She
knows it all from Hog Ranch to highest sea-wave cascades, and higher,
yet higher.
I ought not to fun away letter space in speaking to you. I am weary and
impractical and fit for nothing serious until I am tuned and toned by
a few weeks of calm.
Farewell. I will see you and we will plan work and ease and days of holy
mountain rest. Remember me to Ned and all the boys and to the Doctor,
who ought to come hither with you.
Ever your friend,
JOHN MUIR.
Yosemite Valley,
July 27th, 1872.
I want to see you. I want to speak about my studies, which are growing
broader and broader and spreading away to all countries without any
clear horizon anywhere.
I will go over all this Yosemite region this fall and write it up in some
form or other. Will you be here to accompany me in my easier excursions?
I have a good horse for you and will get a tub and plenty of meal and
tea, and you will keep house in very old style and you can bring whom
you please.
I’ve had a very noble time with Gray, who, though brooded and breaded by
Hutchings, gave most of his time to me. I was sorry that his time was
so meanly measured and bounded. He is a most cordial lover of purity
and truth, but the angular factiness of his pursuits has kept him at
too cold a distance from the spirit world.
I know that Mrs. Moore has given you ice in abundance, though even
Yosemite glaciers might melt in the warmth of her laughter and sunshine.
She handles glacier periods like an Agassiz and has discovered a Hetch
Hetchy period that is her own. Don’t you believe all she tells you about
the walk and the dark and the dust of Indian Cañon.