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Show 225 Indeed, Muir's storm was the perfect illustration of Thoreau's thesis. The storm reminded him that the land was still alive. "The rain brought out all the colors of the woods with the most delightful freshness." As he sauntered through the dripping forest he saw: "The woods were born again." In the final draft of his conclusion, Muir eradicated much of the language of Thoreau, as well as the Biblical language, adding a little of his own Scottish, to make it his own. The world needs the woods, and is beginning to come to them; but it is not yet ready for the fine banks and braes of the lower Sierra, any more than for storms. Tourists make their way through the foot-hill landscapes as if blind to all their best beauty, and like children seek the emphasized mountains. Muir's lesson was an extension of Thoreau's. You couldn't have trees without the storms which fed them. Muir had drawn the line, the frontier of Man's dominion over Nature, and was making his first tentative stand for the preservation of the wild natural landscape wherever it was found. WIND FROM THE WILDERNESS Perhaps the most famous of Muir's Stormy Sermons was published in 1878 in Scribner's as "Wind Storm in the Forests of the Yuba." It is a companion to "Flood Storm in the Sierra." Here, however, Muir only wished to show what might be learned from the wind. "After one has seen pines six feet in diameter |