i've been dead for decades, my dear, but if you insist

I would like to introduce you to the man I want to marry. Unfortunately, he died before I was born.

His name is John Muir. Here he is:

I picked up a collection of his Yellowstone musings my first week here. He loved Yellowstone, also the West, and comes closer to doing its beauty justice with mere words than any other prose I've read.

Take, for example, what he says about our geyser basins:

"In these natural laboratories one needs stout faith to feel at ease. The ground sounds hollow underfoot, and the awful subterranean thunder shakes one's mind as the ground is shaken. In the solemn gloom, the geysers, dimly visible, look like monstrous dancing ghosts, and their wild songs and earthquake thunder replying to the storms overhead seem doubly terrible, as if divine government were at an end.

"But the trembling hills keep their places. The sky clears, the rosy dawn is reassuring, and up comes the sun like a god, pouring his faithful beams across the mountains and forest, lighting each peak and tree and ghastly geyser alike, and shining into the eyes of the reeking springs, clothing them with rainbow light, and dissolving the seeming chaos of darkness into varied forms of harmony."

What a treat! An absolute feast of words. He gives good advice as well:

"Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

Everything the man writes is like this: informative and rich and rhythmic and deep. Friends, if you come to Yellowstone, read some John Muir,

"Then, with fresh heart, go down to your work, and whatever your fate, under whatever ignorance or knowledge you may afterward chance to suffer, you will remember these fine, wild views, and look back with joy to your wanderings in the blessed old Yellowstone Wonderland."