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Show 452. Johnson took it for. He sent a copy to Jeanne Carr, and said, "You will say I should have written it long ago. . . ." Finally he captured, in one volume, a sense of his whole experience in the Sierra and California during the seventies. There was little new in the book, except its structure. Muir's language had undergone a gradual change since the seventies, and so the essays had become more genteel and polished. All the craggy corners were rubbed off, and the yosemite Oak had become an elm. No doubt Muir had written his classic at the expense of spontaneity. Because its origin was in the vision achieved in mountaineering, and in the substance which came from Muir's careful method of study, the whole is informed by the soul of the wilderness, despite the picturesque language which is so noticeable to a modern reader. The richness of Muir's years in the Sierra could not be hidden by a patina of genteel language and the richness was finally triumphant. Muir felt the necessity of craft in this book perhaps more than in any other he wrote, and he justified the book's structure and language in a letter to Johnson, explaining that he had leaned chapters carefully against each other, and had killed "adjectives and adverbs of redundant growth." His most revealing statement was about the relationship between poetry and science there. In it I have ventured to drop into the poetry that I like but have taken good care to place it between bluffs and buttresses of bold geological facts. |