Yet his every-day talk about his
favorite trees and glaciers had more of the glow of poetry in it
than any talk I have ever heard from men of letters, and his
books and "Journal" will long perpetuate this thrilling sense of
personal contact with wild, clean, uplifted things--blossoms in
giant tree-tops and snow-eddies blowing round the shoulders of
Alaskan peaks. Here is a West as far above Jack London's and
Frank Norris's as the snow-line is higher than the jungle.
The rediscovery of the South was not so much an exploration of
fresh or forgotten geographical territory, as it was a new
perception of the romantic human material offered by a peculiar
civilization. Political and social causes had long kept the South
in isolation. A few writers like Wirt, Kennedy, Longstreet,
Simms, had described various aspects of its life with grace or
vivacity, but the best picture of colonial Virginia had been
drawn, after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read about it in
books. Visitors like Fanny Kemble and Frederick Law Olmsted
sketched the South of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly
than did the sons of the soil.
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