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Show 386. hint of the fine beauty that lies hid in the wildernesses of the California Alps." Even his consistent use of the term "California Alps" was a clue to his concession to the expectations of the picturesque tradition; Nature looked like art, and the Sierra looked like the Alps which the genteel audience had experienced in the prints and paintings of Europe. After all, the American painters had all taken an obligatory trip to Europe and had learned to paint landscapes there before they had returned to paint the landscapes of the American West. But Muir was not totally lost to the importance of his own vision during these years. He resisted a morbid version of the picturesque, a gothic view of wilderness, knowing it could lead to the gothic of Ruskin for instance: And I know something about "the blasted trunk, and the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak winds, the solemn solitudes of moors and seas, the roar of the black, perilous, merciless whirlpools of the mountain streams;" and they have a language for me, but they declare nothing of wrath or of hell, only Love plain as was ever spoken. Though his language was in danger - grave danger - his undiminished appreciation of the extravagant and the exuberant was apparent when he wrote of the trees and the falls of the Sierra, fet here he fell into a habit which he frowned upon when speaking of the works of Nature, the habit of comparison, contrast, and the judgment of relative merit when speaking of living trees and waters, all equal in the eyes of their creator. |