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Show 144. come down to Yosemite, where all my ice has come, and prove that each dome and brow and wall, and every grace and spire and brother is the necessary result of the delicately balanced blows of well directed and combined glaciers against the parent rocks which contained them. . , The Studies became more and less than Muir thought they would be in 1871. He would be true to his own path of thought, and would argue that Yosemite Valley was the end of a grand chapter of glacial history. But he finally attempted to show more than a unified, predetermined Sierra as monumental sculpture. He also provided a guide, a way to his own vision. On the other hand, a book which attempted to describe each landmark as a preconceived work of art would have been encyclopedic and a substitute for the experience of the Sierra itself. He did not want to write this kind of book because the Sierra was not simply a collection of monuments; it was flow. There was a tension in Muir's early conception of the Studies. Was he to write a descriptive book, or a guide to vision? Could he do both at the same time? When we come to the Sierra now, we come to it frequently as if it were a playground. We assume that someone knows how it was created, and that we can go to such an authority if we wish to understand its natural history. But this was not true, we scarcely need to be reminded, for Muir. Even if it were, he would have wanted to make these discoveries for himself. I have seen this self-reliant impulse at work in |