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Show 335. So in his revised version of the incident, he eliminated the dim and clod-like aspect of his eagle, did not mention any "excelsior instincts," and consequently presented neither a discontented eagle, nor a discontented Muir. Such a revision allowed him to present unambiguously the much admired conclusion of the essay: It may be asked, what have mountains fifty or a hundred miles away to do with Twenty Hill Hollow? To wild people, these mountains are not a hundred miles away. Their spiritual power and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends. They rise as a portion of the hilled walls of the hollow. You can not feel yourself out-of-doors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your separate existence; you blend with the landscape and become part and parcel of Nature. Muir wished such an oceanic experience, even in a sheep camp, and his essay was a kind of acceptance and even rationalization; it allowed him to make peace with the "power [which] could fetch the sky king down into the grass with the larks." To "wild people" like Muir, for whom Nature is all one piece, the mountains should always be in mind. Still, there remained a central contradiction. The reader, as Muir had described him, was not wild though he might become extravagant, at least as Thoreau defined the term: |