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Show 418. the Big Tuolumne Canon - how the white waters were singing there, and the winds, and how the clouds were marching. In Hetch Hetchy Valley also, and the great King's River Yosemite, and in all the other canons and valleys of the Sierra from Shasta to the southernmost fountains of the Kern - five hundred miles of flooded waterfalls chanting together. What a psalm was that! This was the great vision of watersheds he depicted in the Stormy Sermons. Here was the argument of the sublime, the God's eye view of the power of Nature which jerked one out of one's self, a vision which explained the truth about things frail and fleeting and types of endurance meeting in Yosemite. This kind of rhetoric came naturally to Muir and was a quantum leap in consciousness from the picturesque. The essay was perhaps the best Muir ever wrote about the function of National Parks, because of its drama, its clarity, and the moral certainty implicit in his slow but steady ascent toward the wild and holy power of Nature. It was, finally, a sermon. Muir did not expect the congregation to duplicate his experience. Like Father Mapple in Moby Dick, he drew up his ladder behind himself. But the intensity of his own baptism still seduces one, and suggests that unsafe experience should he available to those who are capable, who are hearty enough to seek it. In showing his reader how he had discovered himself as a part of the power of the wilderness, Muir presented the strongest possible argument for National Parks as wild Places where each man could seek, according to his ability, |