There is at least a punky spark in my heart and it may blaze in this autumn gold, fanned by the King. Some of my grandfathers must have been born on a muirland for there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that send me to Cassiope, and oozing through all my veins impel me unhaltingly through endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better.

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (perhaps Autumn 1870); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir (1924), chapter 8: Yosemite, Emerson, and the Sequoias