Glacier Meadows - John Muir

Except from John Muir's "The Mountains of California", describing Glacier Meadows, first published 1894.

I cannot give anything like an adequate idea of the exquisite beauty of these mountain carpets as they lay smoothly outspread in the savage wilderness. What words are fine enough to picture them? To what shall we liken them? The flowery levels of the prairies of the old West, the luxuriant savannahs of the South, and the finest of cultivated meadows are coarse in comparison. One may at first sight compare them with the carefully tended lawns of pleasure-grounds; for they are as free from weeds as they, and as smooth, but there the likeness ends; for these wild lawns, with all their exquisite fineness, have no trace of that painful, licked, snipped, repressed appearance that pleasure-ground lawns are apt to have even when viewed at a distance. And, not to mention the flowers with which they are brightened, their grasses are very much finer both in color and texture, and instead of lying flat and motionless, matted together like a dead green cloth, they respond to the touches of every breeze, rejoicing in pure wildness, blooming and fruiting in the vital light.

Beautiful isn't it?

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