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Show 51. His mountain rambles were filled with the lessons of rocks and the songs of waterfalls: serious study and pure pleasure. He was not willing to sacrifice either. In fact, he had been content since his first summer to reconcile himself with the possibility that he might never be able to read the "grand page" of the Sierra's history. Nature, he knew, was deep and difficult, and a man's powers shallow. "Yet why should one bewail one's poor feeble ignorance. The beauty is visible and that we can enjoy, though the grand mechanical causes may lie beyond our ken." At this point in his intercourse with mountains, it was sufficient to know that the Sierra had meaning, even if he could not read it. At this point he could delight in his experience. This seemed to require very little discipline, at least not by the definition of the term a contemporary might accept. So he reminded himself, even in 1872, that he would "rather stand in what all the world would call an idle manner," because "So-called sentimental, transcendental dreaming seems the only sensible and substantial business that one can engage in." He was not ready to narrow his attention to bookmaking. He was not ready to narrow his attention at all. Just as he refused to settle down, so he refused to accept any confined vocation because his own aims were so diverse. When he wrote his early narratives for the New York Tribune and Overland Monthly, he had difficulty integrating his sensations and perceptions about botany and geology. Likewise, in his narrative account of the first ascent of Cathedral Peak, |