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Show 342. geology, Muir hoped, would be cold and passionless. As he later argued in "The Glacier Meadows of the Sierra," an Emersonian kind of transcendence, which allowed the tourist to "become all eye, sifted through and through with light and beauty," and "gave inexpressible delight," was also educational: The influences of pure nature seem to be so little known as yet, that it is generally supposed that complete pleasure of this kind, permeating one's very flesh and bones, unfits the student for scientific pursuits in which cool judgment and observation are required. But the effect is just the opposite. Instead of producing a dissipated condition, the mind is fertilized and stimulated and developed like sun-fed plants. He humanized Nature but did not become fanciful. Perhaps his use of anthropocentric and anthropomorphic language was a concession to Emerson's dictum that "the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow men." Muir was using the symbolic language of the garden pastoral because it seemed to be the only language accessible to his readers. He was right. A modern critic has seen a split in the American outlook, entrenched in the language of the earliest commentaries on the American scene: To depict America as a garden is to express aspirations still considered Utopian - aspirations, that is, toward abundance, leisure, freedom, and a greater harmony of |