Creator

J. E. Calkins

Recipient

John Muir

Preview

image preview

Transcription

3prying critic to rest upon. Your little sketch concluding chap. IV of Our National Parks, wherein you relate Emerson's visit to the Sequoias, may safely challenge anything ever written in English for beauty of imagery and profound pathos and sweet simple telling's and the story of the birth of the talus, chap. VIII, same volume, is a noble achievement in the more than difficult art of describing the indescribable. At least so I see it, and I make bold to tell you, since in a review I wrote of this book some time ago, and in other occasional references to yourself and your work, as made by me in my paper, I have taken the liberty of saying quite as much as I have said in these scrawled lines. Perhaps your publishers sent you those notices, and, again, perhaps they did not, anyway I send you the gist of them all in this, and thereby do myself the favor of freely speaking my mind, whether you are pleased by it or not.all this by way of justification of my assertion that your letter gave me the keenest of pleasure. Now that you know how much I have liked you, and wanted to know you, you may understand how much I was delighted at such a letter as you sent me. Like the first check a man gets for the stuff he writes, it seems as though I ought to frame it; only, like marriage certificates and other holy things, such things are rather to be kept hidden away in some secret reliquary, to be taken out and looked at now and then in moments of rare retrospection and reflection; not to be03431

Location

Davenport, Iowa

Date Original

1904-08-23 00:00

Source

Original letter dimensions: 30.5 x 22 cm.

Resource Identifier

muir14_0490-let.tif

File Identifier

Reel 14, Image 0490

Copyright Statement

Some letters written to John Muir may be protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user.

Owning Institution

University of the Pacific Library Holt-Atherton Special Collections. Please contact this institution directly to obtain copies of the images or permission to publish or use them beyond educational purposes.

Page Number

Page 3

Keywords

John Muir, correspondence, letters, author, writing, naturalist, California, correspondent, mail, message, post, exchange of letters, missive, notes, epistle

Share

COinS