of those new-found Romantics whose exaltation of the self and of the divine sublimity of the natural world made such sweet sense to him after a childhood in the bleak barrens of crypto-Calvinism. The poets’ views as expressed, for example, in the lines of Mark Akenside (one of Muir’s youthful favorites) were much nearer his own than those he heard in his father’s voice and in the marathon prayers offered up in Sunday services. He, like Akenside, knew solitude and the calm healing of nature
When, all alone, for many a summer’s day,
I wander’d through your calm recesses, led
In silence by some powerful hand unseen.
Sitting through those Sunday meetings at which his own father often presided in awful solemnity, clad in ministerial blacks and praying with tight-shut eyes for almost an hour at a stretch, Muir chewed windflower seeds to stay awake and perhaps to fill his mind with a paradise of flowers instead of the smoke of brimstone. And in these hours he must have been thinking about how he might continue to believe and to practice Christianity in a way different from that he was in these Sabbath moments experiencing.
Was it possible that some central essence of Christianity could be segregated or extracted from Christianity as commonly practiced and preached? Was there a way of belief that ran in another direction than this strait one so hedged about with negations and clouded with doom and destruction? Lines from a poem that Muir wrote at this time suggest that the young man now viewed the local religious practices with a somewhat detached and critical eye. In an apostrophe to the old log schoolhouse whose patient walls have borne the “blasts of strong revival,” Muir wrote that human souls, too, have suffered these blasts, and that while souls were being saved, they were also being “pulled, and twisted/ All out of shape, till they no longer fitted/ The frightened bodies that to each belonged.”
And yet, what were the alternatives? Clearly unbelief was out of the question. Not only was the force of all Muir’s training against this but, even more significantly, so were his own observations and inclinations. Already he had been touched by the profound mystery of existence, witnessing it in the springtime rebirth of plant life, in the intelligence and feelings of animals, in the wonderful regulation of the whole natural world. His readings of Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romantics had reinforced his conviction that divinity was the source of this mystery, though there was some difficulty in reconciling Milton’s views of that divinity with those of the Romantics, who were certain it was visible in the petals of a flower. No, unbelief was impossible for him, and it is unlikely he ever seriously considered it.
But such substitutes as spiritualism or phrenology were also impossible. Somewhere along the years to young manhood there had entered Muir a tough, knotty skepticism. He knew mystery and felt drawn to it. He also felt he knew the difference between mystery and humbug. And of the latter there was plenty along the advancing frontier of the Middle West in the years before the Civil War. Fredrika Bremer in her tour there in 1849 remarked that the hottest topics of conversation were spirit rappings and Jenny Lind. Muir’s reminiscences of his Wisconsin years make it clear that his neighborhood was visited in its turn by the crazes that swept the rest of the nation: phrenology, the graham-bread regimen for the repression of animal appetite, and so on. None left more than a negative trace on Muir and in a typical exchange between father and eldest son he was able to disabuse Daniel Muir of his new adherence to Sylvester Graham’s bread-and-vegetable diet by quoting Scripture. When the Lord hid Elijah from his enemies, Muir reminded his father, and sent the ravens to feed him, He did not send the prophet graham bread and vegetables but meat. And surely the Lord knew what was best for His own prophet in distress. Daniel Muir had to admit that He did.
So Muir was first and forever a Christian, and even if the fit of the faith was uncomfortable in places and had to be considerably altered to fit his own spiritual needs, it served well enough over time. Christianity might have its blindnesses, and he would define these sharply in coming years, but it was surely better than unbelief, better by far than any of the cults or splinter sects of his day. To say, as some of these did, that they dealt in the occult or the spiritual was not enough to interest him, and indeed he was to prove intolerant of San Francisco spiritualists when he was invited to their seances in the 1870s.
He believed in mystery and generally was content not to attempt to trace spiritual matters to their putative sources, recognizing that certain things could never be understood or explained. On the other hand, he was eager to solve certain kinds of mystery, to see how things worked. So in these farm years he made patient observations of animal habits and learned the secrets of the shrike, how it went about its fatal work of gopher hunting. He devised, too, an ingenious experiment to discover how the honeybees fixed the direction and distance of a food source from their hive. And still thousands of mysteries remained, for he could not feel that in seeing partway into any of them he had thereby exhausted and drained a phenomenon. His experiment with the bees provoked more wonder, not less. So in this way he was led from mystery to mystery with a deepening, widening religious awe, one that went far beyond the confines of conventional Christian practice. There would always be a certain amount of orthodox baggage that he carried within him, and in these years of coming into his own it was often burdensome enough—to himself and to others. But it would become lighter and lighter over the years so that in his late years some would call him a mystic or a pantheist.
The graham-bread episode gives another glimpse of that verbal skirmishing that was the exterior of the battle between father and eldest son. Behind its issue of proper diet there lurked the larger issue of who should define the terms of Muir’s life, and Daniel Muir saw to it, as much as he was able, that the terms were of his own devising. At Fountain Lake and then at Hickory Hill he ran his farm with a military regimentation that left no room for irregularities of behavior and that sought to proscribe those of thought. Muir had to squeeze his reading and nature investigations into whatever odd and stolen moments he could find after the chores had been completed.
The moments were few and precious. In winter when the short days and cold weather precluded any out-of-house activity, Muir had to read under the very eyes of his father, and there was almost no time for it. Daniel Muir’s strict rule in this season was that all should retire immediately after the end of family worship—presumably so that all would be fresh for the next day’s toil. Occasionally on retiring the elder Muir would fail to notice the rapt reader’s candle for perhaps five or ten minutes, “magnificent golden blocks of time,” as Muir remembered them, “long to be remembered like holidays or geological periods.”
One such evening as Muir hurriedly read at some text, his father called out to him from the darkness of his bedroom that John must go to bed along with the others, that he was tired of having to issue a separate order to John every night. If you must read, he added, get up early in the morning to do so. Here again the challenge, and Muir went upstairs into the cold dark, wondering how he could possibly meet it, how he might shake himself awake well before he and the other sleepers heard that stentorian voice from beneath the stairs summoning them to another day.
In the blackness of the bedroom Muir awakened hours later, how many he did not know, and, as he recalled it, “rushed downstairs, scarce feeling my chilblains, enormously eager to see how much time I had won. …” Holding his candle to the little kitchen clock, Muir read the incredible news its face gave back in the flickering light: it was only one o’clock. He had gained five hours on farm life. “I can hardly think,” he was to say, “of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of those five frosty hours.”
It was too cold in the night-and-winter-bound house for Muir to resume his reading, and he knew well enough that his father would begrudge him a fire, reasoning as the elder man would, that Muir would have had to take the time to chop the wood for it that he should have put in otherwise. No, it would all have to be done on his own time, every bit of it. So Muir went down into the mealy gloom of the cellar where, amid the potatoes and the cast-off, rusting tools, he set to work on an invention
