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Show 399. a clear view of his own attitude. For him, there were virtues in the idea of "The National Park as a Camping Place," but he realized that the experience of Yellowstone was educational at center. "One needs a big faith to feel at ease in a shop like this," he said, for first impressions were likely to suggest that "Divine Government were at an and and the world given over to utter chaos and ruin." But a true appreciation of the Park was to be had in seeing it as a fountain of rivers, where the beauty of water could be seen in its origin. "To everybody over all the world water is beautiful forever," Muir argued in the conclusion of his letter to the Bulletin. Yellowstone was a place of origins, and had its spiritual significance in this context. Thus he recognized that the significance of this Park, whatever its proposers might have thought of it, did not lie in the collection of scenic curiosities, but in its true and rightful wholeness, as the mother of great rivers. This was a view that went beyond the idea of National Parks which the nineteenth century wanted to take. Muir knew artificial boundaries set by Man would always mean that only a fragment of the whole would be set apart, though perhaps a central fragment. A truly sublime scene, as Coleridge had suggested, was infinite in extent, blended with the heavens above and was lost in the foreground. One recognized that it was always part of a larger whole. All of Nature was a sublime scene, and in that sense, the only National Park which could hold such a scene |