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 extraordinary 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 a pine tree on the hill above Sleepy Hollow. He had gone to
higher Sierras, and, as I fancied, was again waving his hand in
friendly recognition." And now John Muir has followed his friend of
other days to the "higher Sierras." His earthly remains lie among
trees planted by his own hand. To the pine tree of Sleepy Hollow
answers a guardian sequoia in the sunny Alhambra Valley.
In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous
living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled
him to verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again he
returned to this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest
of the tide-water glaciers appropriately commemorates his name. Upon
this book of Alaska travels, all but finished before his unforeseen
departure, John Muir expended the last months of his life.
