Letter from Charles N. Elliot to John Muir, 1912 May 17.

304 HOYT STREEETMay 17, 1912.Dear Mr. Muir:-After hesitating and delaying for many years, T have come to the point of writing you in appreciation of your writings about Nature as she manifests herself on our great West Coast,in our National Parks, mountains, glaciers and valleys, and to thank you for the pleasure and inspiration which has come to me through your hooks and magazine articles, For some eighteen or twenty years I have collected magazine articles by yourself, by John Burroughs and Walt Whitman,together with articles written by others about these three, to me in common with ever increasing thousands,greatest interpreters of Nature, or we are not able to keep in constant communion with the great out-doors, need someone to bring that vast domain to our desks and our evening lamp, and to keep alive in us that, too often smothered,natural impulse to get close to Mother earth at every opportunity, T have just been re-reading your My First Summer in the Sierra ,in which your vital descriptions have made me to walk with you under the translucent fronds of the giant California ferns,face with bated breath the upreared,lei surely tolerant cinnamon bear and sit with awe-struck senses with my heels wedged in a throe inch crevice over the edge of mighty Yoeemite.fhie last scene the more vivid to me,because of bringing to monory ray own feat some years since,in leaping a narrow ribbon of rushing Bnoqualmie and sitting for hours on the point of rock which splits (or did a few years ago) the rushing flood at the very brink of its nerr 300 foot leap, my logs hanging in space, my soul soaring higher than ever the water foil