I received the news of your terrible bereavement a few moments ago, and
can only say that you have my heart sympathy and prayer that our Father
may sustain and soothe you.
Dr. Kellogg and Billy Simms left me a week ago at Mono, going directly
to Yosemite. I reached this queen of lakes, two days ago and rode down
around the shore on the east side. Will continue on around up the west
coast homeward through Lake and Hope valleys and over the Sierra to
Yosemite by the Virginia Creek trail, or Sonora road if much snow should
fall. Will reach Yosemite in about a week.
Somehow I had no hopes of meeting you here. I could not hear you or see
you, yet you shared all of my highest pleasures, as I sauntered through
the piney woods, pausing countless times to absorb the blue glimpses of
the lake, all so heavenly clean, so terrestrial yet so openly spiritual.
I wish, my dear, dear friends, that you could share this divine day with
me here. The soul of Indian summer is brooding this blue water, and it
enters one’s being as nothing else does. Tahoe is surely not one but
many. As I curve around its heads and bays and look far out on its level
sky fairly tinted and fading in pensive air, I am reminded of all the
mountain lakes I ever knew, as if this were a kind of water heaven to
which they all had come.
Yosemite Valley,
October 7th, 1874.
I expected to have been among the foot-hill drift long ago, but the
mountains fairly seized me, and, ere I knew, I was up the Merced Cañon,
where we were last year, past Shadow and Merced lakes and our soda
springs, etc. I returned last night. Had a glorious storm and a thousand
sacred beauties that seemed yet more and more divine. I camped four
nights at Shadow Lake, at the old place in the pine thickets. I have
ousel tales to tell. I was alone, and during the whole excursion, or
period rather, was in a kind of calm, uncurable ecstasy. I am hopelessly
and forever a mountaineer.
How glorious my studies seem, and how simple! I found out a noble truth
concerning the Merced moraines that escaped me hitherto. Civilization
and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not
dimmed my glacial eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look
at Nature’s loveliness. My own special self is nothing. My feet have
recovered their cunning. I feel myself again. Tell Keith the colors are
coming to the groves.
I leave Yosemite for over the mountains to Mono [?] and Lake Tahoe in a
week, thence anywhere,--Shastaward, etc. I think I may be at Brownsville,
Yuba County, where I may get a letter from you. I promised to call on
Emily Pelton there.
Farewell.