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Show 80 enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape." Muir dissents: "No - always we find more than we expect." And so Emerson only provided a ladder to Muir's vision. After he climbed to the top, he kicked the ladder away. Then he was far above, and alone. His faith in himself and in Nature was more absolute than Emerson's could ever be. "Winter blows the fog out of our heads," he wrote while returning one fall to his home in the mountains. "Nature is not a mirror for the moods of the mind." A man's body had the capacity for more than happiness; it was capable of absorbing the spirit of Nature. When Muir thought about the natural history of man, he understood, as Emerson had not, that the human animal had to accept himself as a part of the flow. Man was not above, but was immersed in, his environment. Now we observe that, in cold mountain altitudes, Spirit is but thinly and plainly clothed. As we descend down their many sides to the valleys, the clothing of all plants and beasts and of the forms of rock becomes more abundant and complicated. When a portion of Spirit clothes itself with a sheet of lichen tissue, colored simply red or yellow, or gray or black, we say that is a low form of life. Yet is it more or less radically Divine than another portion of Spirit that has gathered garments of leaf and fairy flower and adorned them with |