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Show 383. are turning, a new cold light streams over the ridges of the Sierra, and the wind pours through the passes. I can smell winter coming. On a day like this, on a walk like this, I remind myself that Nature is no picture on a parlor wall. But Muir must have known that very well. He must have also decided that such pictures could and would appeal to an audience which he couldn't reach with an ecological argument, the cultured people, the ones who might have the power to act on Muir's ideas. And it did work on readers like Robert Underwood Johnson, who became Muir's most important ally in the nineties. And it did work on David Starr Jordan, who was much too conservative to like Muir's wilder sort of writing. In this context it is a good thing to reread Muir's essay on the ascent of Ritter. In Chapter Three I read it as a parable about his method of study, and how it taught him more than any aesthetic view of Nature could provide. Now I will reverse my reasoning and read the essay as an attempt by Muir to create an essay structured by aesthetic language. When he stepped through the foreground and middleground while narrating his ascent of Mount Ritter, "In the Heart of the California Alps," the scene he entered was precisely the one which still remained in the distance in "Snow Banners." . . . a deep chasm drawn between the divide and the glacier separated the massive picture from everything else. Only the one sublime mountain in sight, the one glacier, and one lake; the whole veiled with one blue shadow - rock, |