FORTY years ago John Muir wrote to a friend; "I
am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer. . . . Civili-
zation and fever, and all the morbidness that has been
hooted at me, have not dimmed my glacial eyes, and
I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's
loveliness." How gloriously he fulfilled the promise
of his early manhood! Fame, all unbidden, wore a
path to his door, but he always remained a modest,
unspoiled mountaineer. Kindred spirits, the greatest
of his time, sought him out, even in his mountain
cabin, and felt honored by his friendship. Ralph
Waldo Emerson urged him to visit Concord and rest
awhile from the strain of his solitary studies in the
Sierra Nevada. But nothing could dislodge him
from the glacial problems of the high Sierra; with
passionate interest he kept at his task. "The gran-
deur of these forces and their glorious results," he once
wrote, "overpower me and inhabit my whole being.
Waking or sleeping, I have no rest. In dreams I read
blurred sheets of glacial writing, or follow lines of
cleavage, or struggle with the difficulties of some ex-
traordinary rock-form."

There is a note of pathos, the echo of an unfulfilled
hope, in the record of his later visit to Concord. "It
was seventeen years after our parting on Wawona
ridge that I stood beside his [ Emerson's] grave under

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