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five or six companies. I welcomed them to the world -- congratulated them upon the goodness of their home, and blessed them for their beauty - leaving them a happy flock in keeping of the great Shepherd, while I turned to the misshapen half-manufactured creatures of mine. The coast mountains look grandly in their new snow and the mist mountains over the San Joaquin plain appear like a central snow-clad range as rocky as the Sierras. Perhaps I do not understand the request of Moses, “Show me thy glory,” but if he were here I would like to take him to one of my Twenty Hill H[ollow] observatories and after allowing him time to drink the glories of flower, mountain, and sky I would ask him how they compared with those of the valley of the Nile and of Mt. Pisgah, and then I would inquire how he had the conscience to ask for more glory when such oceans and atmospheres were about him. King David was a better observer, “The whole earth is full of thy glory.” I think that if a revivalist intoxicated with religion of too high a temperature for his weak nerves were to awake from his exhaustion and find himself upon the rim of Twenty Hill Hollow he would above such sheets of plant gold and beneath such a sky fancy himself in heaven. Especially if a camp meeting were going on at the time. Ah, here he would say as he gazed upon the sheeted comps., filling the flat spaces, paving every straight or winding ravine, Here are the streets of gold, and there are Wesley’s never-withering flowers. I hear the blessed multitude, I breathe the atmosphere of angels, I am beneath the cloudless sky of New Jerusalem. 14th N.W. 5 Clouds .05 balmy. Go-quicks out of holes. Birds, squirrels, hares and flowers full of springtime joy. Winter made but one invasion of these plains, when he came down from his mountains with sleet and icy rain - perhaps some birds died, many sheep and hogs, but not a single plant. Flower suns are rising in every quarter of the valley sky and mingle their gold with the silvery gleaming crystal stars of quartz so abundant here. 15th N.W. 5. Clouds .05. Balmy, happy, bright. 17th N.W. 2. Clouds a filmy dimness on summit. Black ants out and at work. Many are in dull heaps
Date Original
1869
Source
Original journal dimensions: 14 x 18 cm.
Resource Identifier
MuirReel23Journal03P56-57.tif
Publisher
Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library
Rights Management
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Keywords
John Muir, journals, drawings, writings, travel, journaling, naturalist
