With Muir In Yosemite
by Robert Underwood Johnson
Great Nature has her times of dominance
When men seem pigmies and she cries aloud—
"Play at your love and lordly circumstance;
You have but little leisure to be proud,
Your life is but a passing hour beguiled
A trivial game that might amuse a child.
I am immortal. Every stream that flows
To gladden sorrow or to lessen pain
Is but the harvest of perpetual snows
That mock at striving with a cold disdain.
And while your wounding toil in me seeks balm
I from my heights look down on you in calm.
But I have been your friend and still shall be—
Your playmate, nurse, companion of your grief;
E'en to the portal of Eternity,
My breast shall give your restlessness relief.
You count yourselves as free—I know you slaves,
And watch the generations make their graves .
"These words I heard above Yosemite,
Camping beneath large stars with that rare soul—
Him of the glacier and the mammoth tree,
Who followed Nature to her shyest goal,
He heard her solemn message in the night,
Nor ever failed to read its tune aright.
Yet, knowing many a secret of her keep
He was not overawed by what he learned;
Noting the flower bloom the glacier creep,
In each a thought of God by him di scerned.
He found no accident in Nature's plan
But all created for the good of man.
Ere dawn had kissed the level valley floor
He climbed to summits through the sleeping wood
By the inerrant guide of forest lore,
And found companionship in solitude.
He feared no beast and by no beast was feared
And none was startled when his shape appeared.
With him I mounted the high precipice—
Halfway to Heaven it seemed—his open book.
His hail was cheer that not a June would miss;
None but the Baptist had so rapt a " look."
But tears were in his voice when he deplored
That lofty waterfalls no longer roared.
For here was havoc of the woodland roof
Its mountain meadows were but barren sod
The innocent flocks had murdered with the hoof,
—And man had minimized the work of God.
The wintry snows that fed the summer streams
Too early felt the sun's dissolving beams.
There, by the campfire of Tuolumne
The hour when hearts reveal their inmost hoard,—
We planned the rescue that was soon to be,
Shouting again the glory of the Lord.
How did his reverent memory rejoice
To hear once more the water's joyful voice!
And so by him, or haply, in his name,
Were saved a hundred treasures of the wild.
Alas! that one, the Valley of Our Shame,
By man should be dishonored and defiled,
When beauty was bedraggled in the mart
He sought the wilderness—a broken heart!
In high Sierra should his dust repose,
For there his spirit lives, great Nature 's priest,
In pity not in scorn he wept her foes
A crumb of beauty was to him a feast.
He gave her sacrament to all who came
Sight to the blind and vigor to the lame.
Pilgrims of mind and heart who humbly come
To worship at this holy shrine of God;
Something there is than all of Nature 's sun
More worth, more permanent than peak or sod
Seek ye the great of soul? Ye shall not find
A nobler cynosure of humankind.
