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Show 375. pieces. Well, perhaps I am being too dogmatic. For the present, it may be enough to say t h a t a e s t h e t i c categories t e l l us more about men than about Nature, and so Muir's use of aesthetic categories t e l l s us about him, or about his assumptions about the audience he used them for. The most anthropocentric of a e s t h e t i c categories was certainly that called "the picturesque." Falling between what could be c a l l e d beautiful (what was lawful, understandable, and unified in Nature, that which could be appreciated because of its inherent form, a daisy for instance) and the sublime (that which seemed i n f i n i t e , in size or power, and thus could not be comprehended by men, and could not be fully appreciated because i t transcended human judgment) , the picturesque was devised as a kind of "wild c i v i l i t y , " a way to create an aesthetic whole, a moderate scene out of sublime elements. Essentially, the observer who looked for the picturesque tried to see Nature as i t conformed with the rules of painting. One sees such attempts in the paintings of the Hudson's River School, and in the l i t e r a r y descriptions of James Fenimore Cooper. The picturesque took on a more vulgar form, however, where everything that was i n t e r e s t i n g to the t o u r i s t could be described in conventional terms. Thus one had books called Picturesque America, Picturesque California Homes, and the collection Muir edited in 188 7-88, Picturesque California and the Region West of the Rocky Mountains from Alaska to Mexico. The archetype for such a book was Bryant's Picturesque |