on Nature with a poet’s eye!’’
What Campbell and the others gave him was not an appreciation of the natural world; he already had that and better and deeper than almost any of them. It was rather their gift of reflection that was significant: reflection on the meanings of life as these were manifested in nature and, perhaps equally significant at this stage, the reflection of himself in their words. For in the pages of the poets he found expressions of that mystical affinity he had himself experienced since childhood when the “magic of Nature first breathed on my mind,’’ as his countryman Campbell had written. Here in print and bound between covers—and codified thus—were confirmations of his own deepest predilections and intuitions. There had been others like himself! And not only that, but some of them had been famous. The effect of this discovery on Muir can hardly be overemphasized, for it gave him a view of himself that had been utterly unobtainable before and that would prove a source of continuous encouragement. Campbell’s once-famous The Pleasures of Hope is only the most obvious example of the effect of the poets on this young farmer. In truth, all of them were hope bringers, as tangible as those sweet-songed bluebirds that announced spring.
Like Gray and Taylor, Muir now also began to write verses, though about what must remain a mystery since all but two specimens have been lost, and one of these survives merely as a reference to its subject matter. But the reference to his elegy on the death of an old tree in the neighborhood does indicate the influence of the Romantics for whom this subject was a favorite.
He read novels, too, but these had to be consumed in secret. Still, he managed to get through several of Scott’s, which he borrowed from William Duncan, smuggling them into the house under his clothing and turning their pages in moments almost as precious as the books themselves.
He also began to get his first sense of the vast reaches of history through his reading of Plutarch and Josephus as well as John George Wood’s then-standard Natural History. Ultimately this scale of vision would rival the Romantic humanism he was now imbibing and encourage a cosmic vision in which man himself was almost lost, a tiny, puny creature distinguished mainly by his outsized claims to dominion over the earth. But now literature and history harmonized to broaden Muir’s scope of thought and provide him with creative ways to think about the world and himself in it.
Once it became known in the neighborhood that Daniel Muir’s son, Johnnie, liked to read books, help and encouragement came to him from unsuspected sources. A number of Scots immigrants nearby were intellectually active and a few had brought with them modest but good libraries. Now they began to come forward with offers of help and, equally as vital, with words of encouragement, words that fell with the sweetness of benediction on ears long tuned to the rasp of criticism. In particular Mrs. Jean Galloway (David Galloway’s mother and a woman Muir was to remember as a second mother to him), William Duncan, and Dr. William Meacher took active interest in Muir’s development. Duncan had perhaps the largest library in that neighborhood, and he often suggested to Muir that he come by and browse in its treasures.
The neighborhood situation, so fortuitous to Muir, was not as extraordinary as might appear. The Scots had a proud and ancient intellectual tradition, and figures of the Scottish Enlightenment had been potent influences in the thought of the entire European community. In the New World, Scots immigrants had been conscious of the need to carry on that tradition, and so in the eighteenth century, while some Caledonians were blazing trails and creating homesteads in woodlands, others were maintaining intellectual ties with the Old World and vitalizing the life of the mind in the New. Cadwallader Colden, for example, became an active and systematic botanizer in upper New York State and kept close ties for years with the great Linnaeus. Moreover, his treatise on the Iroquois confederacy, The History of the Five Indian Nations (first published in 1727), is a mine of ethnographical information. Another who sent a steady stream of information about the New World to Linnaeus was the Charleston doctor Alexander Garden (for whom the gardenia is named). In addition to making important early studies of epidemics of yellow fever and smallpox, Garden was also interested in the medicinal properties of local plants and wrote Linnaeus of the vermifuge qualities of pinkroot. And John Lining of that same city made early observations on the relationship between forest clearances and regional climatic conditions, a relationship of which Wisconsin settlers in Muir’s century were still ignorant.
Nor was the keeping of the Scots intellectual tradition confined to formally educated immigrants. Travelers along the edges of the advancing American civilization constantly remarked on the presence of books, newspapers, and almanacs in the often rude homes of the settlers, and many of those on the very fringes were the hardy Scots. In Muir’s own reminiscences of his neighborhood there is further evidence, for the substance of the debate he described there on the whites’ treatment of the Indians shows the settlers were familiar with the arguments of such Scots philosophers as William Robertson and Adam Ferguson, who had addressed this same tangled problem.
For Muir the importance of the existence of the Scots intellectual tradition on the frontier is obvious, for without the help of its carriers, such as Duncan, Meacher, and the Gray and Taylor families, it is hard to see how Muir, wholly unaided, might have found his way into the life of the mind. What is less obvious is that through the help and example of these people Muir was making another crucial discovery: that the Scots had a parallel tradition of the intelligent, intellectually curious workingman. William Duncan, miner and stonemason, was perhaps the nearest example, but as Muir went on with his reading and his conversations with his neighbors, he discovered other examples, and all his life he was to continue to do so and to take a special, telling pride in them. Hugh Miller, the great Scots geologist of whom Jean Galloway spoke to Muir, had begun his career as an untutored laborer in a stone quarry, and one of his most important collaborators had been Robert Dick, a workingman from Thurso who gave Miller his own collections of fossil fish. David Douglas, whose explorations of the Pacific Northwest added so much to the fund of knowledge of the New World, had been the son of a stone mason and had begun his botanical studies as the apprentice to the head gardener at Scone Castle. So even now Muir began to see that a life of manual labor—if indeed this was to be his lot—need not mean a brutalized, mindless existence, that it might be possible to go on with one’s studies even as one wore the harness of repetitive chores.
But perhaps it was not absolutely given that a workingman remain fixed in that physical place where life had put him. For Muir was learning too in these days that his countrymen, those wandering Scots, had adventured in virtually every land on the globe. He had known in his Dunbar school days of the great Alexander Wilson, who traveled in the New World when it was yet a vast, unmarked wilderness, and doubtless he had heard tales of those hundreds of Scots who had fanned out through the breadth of the continent as trappers, scouts, and fur traders: Alexander Mackenzie, to take but one example, who explored an unimaginably vast area of the Pacific Northwest.
He read too of the exploits of Mungo Park, the Edinburgh surgeon who explored the Niger for eighteen months, during which he endured fabulous privation merely for the chance of “rendering the geography of Africa more familiar to my countrymen.” Park’s heroism made a deep impression on Muir; it seemed wonderful to be willing to suffer and dare so much in so disinterested a cause. And there was buried in the midst of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa an episode that may well have given Muir much to muse on, not only on the Wisconsin farms but in after years. Park had just been stripped and robbed by a band of Foulahs who took his horse and compass, leaving him utterly destitute and alone. “I saw myself,” he wrote,
in the midst of a vast wilderness, in the depth of the rainy season—naked and alone, surrounded by savage animals, and men still more savage. I was five hundred miles from the nearest European settlement. All these circumstances crowded at once on my recollection, and I confess that my spirits began to fail me. I considered my fate as certain, and that I had no other alternative but to lie down and perish.
At this moment of almost terminal despair Park experienced an epiphany when his distracted eye happened to fall upon a small moss, the extraordinary beauty of which so
