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Show 129 monuments of the ancient ice-rivers that brought them into relief. The lesson is simple enough. Even his friends had admitted, 'Art is long, and art is limited, you know. . . . " A man could :ome to grasp the true harmony of the mountains only by the process Leslie Stephen had also recommended: . . . no one can decipher the natural writing on the face of a snowslope or a precipice who has not wandered among their recesses, and learned by slow experience what is indicated by marks which an ignorant observer would scarcely notice. Muir was finally suggesting that the artists were ignorant observers, and when they returned to the Valley together, with their "precious sketches," he felt that he had gained much more. THE PRODIGAL SON I am glad to know, by you and Emerson and others living and dead, that my unconditional surrender to Nature has produced exactly what you have foreseen - that drifting without human charts through light and dark, calm and storm, I have come to so glorious an ocean. - Letter to"Jeanne Carr, March 16, 1872 What had he gained? What was the value of this "wilderness experience?" what did it mean? Had it made a man of him? How would it help his future? These were not the questions |